Instructional Process
Domain 2, Instructional Process, tests planning, delivery, engagement, management, grouping, questioning, differentiation, and technology integration. Questions ask which strategy fits an objective, developmental level, and context.
Core concepts
- Backward design: identify desired results, determine acceptable evidence, then plan learning experiences.
- Bloom's revised taxonomy: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create. Align objectives, questions, and tasks to the intended level.
- Gagné's nine events include gaining attention, stating objectives, activating prior knowledge, presenting content, guiding practice, eliciting performance, giving feedback, assessing, and enhancing transfer.
- Gradual release ('I do, we do, you do') moves from modeling to guided practice to independence.
- Cooperative learning requires positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, social skills, and group processing.
- Questioning: use purposeful wait time (about 3–5 seconds), higher-order prompts, and follow-ups that demand evidence.
- Management: Kounin's withitness, overlapping, smoothness, and momentum; clear routines prevent problems. Match expectations to developmental level.
- Differentiation adjusts content, process, or product; UDL offers multiple means of engagement, representation, and action/expression.
- Technology: TPACK connects content, pedagogy, and technology; SAMR describes substitution through redefinition.
Worked example
A seventh-grade science teacher introduces lab safety. She models equipment use, states the objective, guides a whole-class walkthrough, then assigns lab roles so each student is accountable. Pairs complete a safety scenario card, and an exit ticket checks transfer. Reasoning: modeling and guided practice reduce errors; roles create individual accountability; the exit ticket supplies formative evidence before the real lab.
Traps
Group work without individual accountability lets students disengage. Differentiation is not extra worksheets. Bloom labels must match actual cognitive demand. Technology should transform the task, not digitize a worksheet. Weak transitions and routines undermine management, and self-answering questions ('Isn't it...?') lower thinking.