Hone In! Finding your Topic Focus

Introduction

Within the Interpersonal domain are many, many topics and subtopics. Some of the topics are so broad, that it would be difficult to cover all the information within that topic. In designing instruction for a specific project, it is essential to identify your topic before you can even start to address any possible methods or strategies.

Perhaps you think you already know your topic. You may have been asked to design a course to help co-workers get along better, help manager become better leaders, or plan a workshop to reduce arguments among staff members. Perhaps you work with a community agency and must design instruction to improve parent teen communications.

Even if someone has assigned a topic to you, after you factor in information from SMEs, learners' needs, learning context, and relevant data, you may end up refining the topic, changing your direction, or narrowing/expanding the instructional focus. Let's assume that you now have an authentic task assigned to you, and at this point have completed a learner and context analysis. You have some ideas that came from your experience and imagination. But how and where can you find more ideas?

One effective way to generate ideas is to do research and read data about interpersonal topics. What topics have been written about? What theories exist? What methods or strategies have been used for certain tasks? What interpersonal topics do trainers address when dealing with specific everyday situations? What interpersonal issues tend to come up when designing training about couple? Parent/child relationships? Boss and co-worker? Business partner siblings?

The focus then of this lesson, will be Exploring Data and Resources to Generate Ideas within the Interpersonal Domain.

What You Will be Doing in this Lesson

In this lesson you will review information about interpersonal topics, including topic and subtopic definitions, theories, research and models. You will be following an example of a hypothetical task, how that task could be broken down into components, how one could select topics relevant to that task, and how to generate ideas from your research.

You'll work in activities where you will link an authentic task with an interpersonal topic or subtopics. You will then be able to research those topics, to generate ideas.

You will participate in a self-paced idea generating activity involving a real authentic instructional task. To do this, you will follow a guide for how to take an authentic interpersonal task, break that task down into components, and link those components with data about interpersonal topics and research.

You’ll also participate in an activity where you'll observe how "ordinary words" used to describe everyday situations can be linked with broad interpersonal issues and situations. (Examples of ordinary words: bossy co-worker, inconsiderate friend).

As an optional activity: you will also be able to add to the Wiki by documenting ideas that you generate. This could include ideas for topics not you generated for about tasks or topics. As another option: after reflecting on Interpersonal Topics, you will after reflecting about Interpersonal Topics, add your ideas on what constitutes Interpersonal Behavior and

activities to analyze the many different types of interpersonal relationships that can exist in the world. Then you will explore the different interpersonal issues that arise in those relationships.

As an optional activity, you will have an opportunity to delve within yourself and your experiences, to see if you can identify any other topics, and generate information you wish to add to the Wiki to help others.

Learning Objectives

Given an authentic instructional task, information about your learners, and data about Interpersonal Domain Topics, you will be able to generate ideas to help meet your specific instructional objective.

Additionally, you will be able to:

• Select topic and subtopic information from the data that is most relevant to your authentic instructional task.
• Consider how this relevant information applies to your task, problem and learners' needs.
• Break down your instructional task into components using data about topics and subtopics within the interpersonal domain.