Traditional pedagogy, which follows an instructional design model, emphasizes efficient teaching, where teachers' goals lead to well-structured lessons that clearly transmit skills and knowledge. Studies of teaching reveal that teachers' planning, instructional activities, and teaching techniques are organized around their instructional goals. However well-planned, teaching is also a dynamic and fluid activity, and teachers must often improvise (McArthur, Stasz, & Zmuidzinas, 1990; Stasz et al., 1992). Thus, models of teaching should be useful for guiding both planned and unplanned aspects of teaching practice.
The CTW approach begins with defining instructional goals, which, in turn, become a focal point for classroom design. Good teachers can identify opportunities that spontaneously arise in the classroom for advancing their instructional goals (Stasz et al., 1992). As described earlier, Teacher 4 used a student's complaint about starting the class five minutes early to talk about the importance of work attitudes for success on the job. Another teacher noted,
I have made a conscious decision to not always have planned lectures, but to let them come naturally from questions found from researching the material. (Teacher 8)
An important challenge for teachers developing integrated curricula is the need to incorporate work context into their instructional planning. This requirement necessarily broadens teachers' instructional goals to include goals related to learning generic skills and work-related attitudes in addition to the basic subject matter. It also challenges teachers to incorporate relevant aspects of work practice into classroom design. To replicate the social context of work, for example, teachers may need to organize team activities where students adopt different roles. When students are given more control over the learning process, as in problem-oriented, project-based assignments, classroom activities may be more fluid and unpredictable--teams may proceed at different paces or require different amounts of guidance. Thus, teachers may be called on to improvise more often and to frequently make use of opportunistic moments for advancing their instructional goals.