One Year In: Reflections on Instructional Design

I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t always been comfortable with the unknown. I like having near instantaneous resolutions to my various curiosities. And this insatiable neurosis—I mean, habit of mind—influenced my career in teaching. During my senior year at ASU (I know, sorry, it was a purely financial decision, trust me), a professor and I were discussing how to handle follow-up questions from students, specifically when those follow-up questions venture beyond our content knowledge as instructors. I assured her that that would never happen to me because I prepare meticulously for any and every follow-up question I could possibly be asked. She pressed, “But Nick, what if they really do ask something you don’t know the answer to?” “Simple,” I said. “I lose sleep.”

Spoiler alert: In my seven years as a high school teacher, I was asked a content question I didn’t know the answer to approximately 4,255,619 times. Each time, I lost sleep. But each time, it made me better at what I do.

Well, what I used to do. I moved on from teaching last summer and accepted a position at the University of Arizona as an Instructional Designer. While there were a lot of transferable skills between the two roles, there were a lot of technical skills that can only come with experience—and the gap between my knowledge base and the knowledge base of my far more experienced colleagues was significant enough to usher in those familiar feelings of restlessness.

Over the past twelve months, I’ve tried to channel my inner sponge, soaking up any bit of expertise from my colleagues that could help me close The Gap. To an extent, it worked. But each week, I’d encounter reminders of just how much I still had to learn. I wondered at what point I would become as savvy as they are. Year 5? Year 10? And if so, what would that mean for me in the meantime? Surely there’s a quotient on how many times I can ask someone how to do something. (Thankfully, there isn’t.)

Then, one day in a June meeting, a colleague from UCATT’s multimedia team said just what I needed to hear. He was promoting some of the services his team offers for Instructional Designers, and he emphasized to us that no task is too great to solve, even if we assume his team won’t know how to solve it. He said, “Look, when you come to us, we don’t always know right away how to do it either. But we work on it, and we figure it out. That’s the job.”

That’s the job.

As Instructional Designers, we aren’t hired because we know everything or because we promise to one day know everything. We’re hired because of our tolerance and aptitude for problem-solving. We take those capacities into our work with instructors, and we persist until that instructor’s vision for their course is realized.

Accessibility issue? Let’s tackle it. Integrating a new tech tool? Let’s optimize. Attempting a discussion strategy on Brightspace that no one has ever done before because it’s wildly audacious? Bring it on.

So, my biggest takeaway one year in?

Any gaps in know-how are perfectly okay, and even unavoidable. Learning to abide in that mystery—and trusting yourself despite it—is the trick.

I’ll let you know when I’ve mastered it.