The famous international teaching design expert and proposer of “fine processing theory”, Charles M. Reigeluth, professor of Teaching System Technology at Indiana University, visited ECNU on August 27, 2016, with the invitation of Professor Gu Xiaoqing, Department of Educational Information Technology of East China Normal University
Professor Reigeluth’s visit to China brought his latest editorial “Theory and Model of Teaching Design (fourth edition)”, which condenses Professor Reigeluth’s ten years of research results. He gave two exciting academic lectures entitled “Instructional Theory for the Learner-Centered Paradigm of Education” and “Reinventing Schools: Why, and How” at the Department of Open Education of ECNU on August 28, 2016.
Prof. Gu Xiaoqing, director of the Department of Educational Information Technology, presided over the lecture. Prof. Ren Yuqun, Executive Deputy Secretary of Party Committee of East China Normal University attended the lecture and welcomed Professor Reigeluth’ visit.
More than 30 teachers and graduate students listened to Prof. Reigeluth’s two lectures and had positive academic interaction with Professor Reigeluth.
In the first lecture on “Instructional Theory for the Learner-Centered Paradigm of Education”, Professor Reigeluth presented the characteristics of a learner-centered educational paradigm: goal-based, task-centered, personalized teaching, self-discipline and internal motivation to stimulate, changing roles, etc., and introduced the teaching stent of the task-centered features.
In the second lecture entitled “Reinventing Schools: Why, What, and How”, Professor Reigeluth introduced the learner-centered paradigm of education applied to schools. He introduced the school system changes from three aspects: the reasons, content and how to practice. By comparing social levels of the agricultural era, industrial age, and information age and the different ways of learning, he showed the necessity of school reform, and then put forward the six core ideas of school reform and gave examples. Finally, he shared that the change of thinking mode, school district help, process change and parallel system are the important aspects of paradigm change, and put forward the general principle of change, and pointed out the direction of change for the researchers.
Professor Reigeluth’s two lectures gave the audiences an academic feast from both the theoretical and practical aspects, and conducted in-depth academic exchanges through questions and so on, allowing the participants to benefit a lot.
During his visit at ECNU, Prof. Gu Xiaoqing, professor of Educational Information Technology, also exchanged views with Professor Reigeluth on academic cooperation possibilities in the near future.
Charles M. Reigeluth received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1969 and a doctorate in teaching psychology from Brigham Young University in 1977, under the tutelage of Professor Merith, the father of the second generation of teaching design, he then worked in the teaching design field. His research areas include the system of school structure adjustment, refinement theory and task analysis, based on computer simulation; textbook assessment and teaching strategies.
Charles M. Reigeluth is currently a professor of Department of teaching system technology of Indiana University , and a world-famous expert in teaching design as well. He is a milestone in the development of teaching system design theory, and one of the representatives of the second generation of teaching system design theory.
On the basis of predecessors’ research, Prof. Reigeluth proposed “Fine Processing Theory”, also called “Elabotation Theory” (ET). The main contents of this theory can be summarized with One goal, Two processes, Four links, Seven strategies. The main contribution of this theory is to provide a macro strategy for the organization of teaching content that meets the cognitive learning theory. Namely: to reveal the structural relationship between the subject contents, the overall consideration of the integrity of subject content, as well as the correlation of the various parts. Its main strategies involve the selection of subject content, sequencing, synthesizing and summarizing, and try to propose the best teaching prescriptions in the above four aspects.
Prof. Reigeluth is one of the most prolific authors in his field, having published nine books and nearly one hundred papers. Among them, “Teaching Design Theory and Model” has been published in the fourth edition (1983. 1999. 2009 2016), which has been becoming a classic work of the field of teaching design. “Teaching Design Theory and Model” of the second edition of the Chinese version (“Teaching Design Theory and Model – teaching theory of the new paradigm”) was translated by three professors: Pei Xinning, Zheng Tai-nian, and Zhao Jian from ECNU, and was published by the Educational Science Press in 2010.
He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Education and Communication (AECT) as the first president of the division. He often participates in various academic conferences and seminars, and has delivered a number of lectures. At the same time, he has served as consultant and reviewer for the journals “Educational Technology Research and Development” and “Educational Technology”, which are international journals in education technology. He has presided over the development of a variety of teaching softwares, and provided expert advisory services for tens of organizations .