Kristi Adkins 1971

The technological approach feels more natural to my teaching style because I am more comfortable with a step-by-step process; it is a more disciplined way to achieve alignment without assuming what the students may or may not already know. I also like how it is a transparent way that stresses organizing and coordinating objectives. It sounds strange to be designing your lessons backward from your end goal to lesson development, but starting with the end in mind allows you to pinpoint exactly what your students need to know.  

There was a moment in my teaching career when a strict step-by-step design felt insufficient. When I was teaching a lesson introducing the five-paragraph essay, I gave them a multi-step format to model their essay.It became more of a robotic exercise, in which they stopped thinking critically about the writing they were to do and focused on the steps to ensure they completed the writing prompt with exactly five paragraphs. They lost their creativity in writing by trying to follow the essay design guidelines. They were too focused on memorizing the steps of drafting a five-paragraph essay and lost sight of the artistic element of creating a piece of writing.  

I believe a hybrid approach in this essay-writing context would have been more beneficial for my students. Even though the technological stance relies on consistency across all 8^th grade English Language Arts classes, as well as the 7^th and 9^th grades, the naturalistic stance relies on openness and learning from routine procedures. This method would maximize class time for collaborative work and peer review, and allow students adequate time to write their essays. A mixture of these two approaches would be disciplined to hold common intentions and flexible to learn what students really learn. 

 Professional judgment is required to decide when to be more disciplined and when to be more flexible. Zhu (2026) mentions three things to plan for when creating your classroom curriculum. 1) building coherence and alignment across a system, 2) learning from classroom use and revising in context, and 3) exercising professional judgment about when to stabilize and when to rethink. (Chapter 3) Applying professional judgment to determine where structure and flexibility should be applied is something best done with my team of English Language Arts teachers. Being successful with the hybrid approach requires deliberate and specific integration. Design judgment is about resolving which stance or approach to take when faced with the choice in your lesson planning, or as Zhu (2026) states, “The real question is not which model is the correct answer or the best choice, but how to exercise design judgment in context, as well as how to build systems that can do so collectively over time.” (Chapter 3)  

References 

Zhu, M. (2026). Maps, Journeys, and What We Choose to Teach: Curriculum Development as Ethical Design Work (Version 1.0) [Open Educational Resource]. Southeastern  Oklahoma State University. https://open.ocolearnok.org/mapsjourneyscurriculum/