Theory - Gagne's Nine Events of Education

I chose Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. These nine events serve as a framework for designing lessons. Step 1 is about gaining the attention of our students, which makes complete sense to me. Step 2 refers to ensuring students know what will be expected and what the learning goals are for the lesson. Step 3 wants students to make connections to prior knowledge or to apply to a situation they have already been through. Step 4 is where the content is presented to the students, and this can be done in a variety of ways. Step 4 leads into step 5 since this is the event where teachers are providing guidance, and giving additional information to help their students in the learning process. As students move to step 6, they are in the active learning stage, they are deepening their level of understanding. Step 7 is providing feedback which is followed by assessing student performance in Step 8. The last step is enhancing retention, and being able to understand the material enough to be able to paraphrase what they have learned (Kelly n.d.)

When considering young elementary students, I like the idea that “Gagne skills are to learned at the lowest level and mastered before proceeding” (Al-Shalabi, Andrews, Alrabea & Kumar 2012). The idea that students can become proficient before being asked to learn more is a positive, when considering young elementary students. I like that the steps are well thought out, and there is a clear path for the teacher and students.

The downside to Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction are that I don’t see a way to deviate from the nine events, yet still be effective. Not all students learn the same way, and some students may never reach the full depth of understanding referred to in the events of instruction. This would be a concern, yet may still be a possible framework if adjustments could be made.  

As far as applying this theory to my own teaching, I think we are doing many of these steps even in elementary school already. This was the first year we taught a common core type math to our students. We spent much more time explaining what our goals were, how we would reach them, allowing students to practice each skill and really worked on the students gaining a deeper level of understanding before we moved to more topics.

If we were to create online practice for young students, the nine events of learning would help teachers stay focused on the goals and help to ensure our students were continually growing and learning. The nine events are a nice map to help get our students through concepts and lessons.

Al-Shalabi, H., Andraws, S., Alrabea, A. I., & Kumar, A. V. S. (2012). V model of

            E-learning using gagne nine steps of education. Journal of Software Engineering

            and  Applications, 5 (11), 850-854. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.liberty.edu:2048/login?

url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1281851414?accountid=12085

Kelly, M. (n.d.). Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from

            http://712educators.about.com/od/learningtheories/tp/Gagnes-Nine-Events-Of-Instruction.htm