Exploring Intersonal Topics/Issues to Help Plan your Strategy

Introduction
Welcome to the lesson on Identifying Topics to Help Plan your Strategy! This lesson will provide information, examples, research and resources that relate to Interpersonal Topics. The purpose of the lesson is to help you define the specific issues and topics of your training; to find related ideas and research you can use to develop strategies; to take what information you have about your project, and locate resources, information and theories that are directly applicable to it.

In designing instruction, how will you know what topics and issues to include?

Perhaps you have been directed to design a course about something of a "personal" or "interpersonal" nature. Your employer may have asked you to to develop training to help people get along better, to help teams work together more effectively, or to help managers be better bosses. Perhaps your employer asked you to design an activity to decrease the arguing between sales reps, or a non-profit family group wants you to develop training to improve parent teen relationships.

The purpose of this lesson is to serve as a springboard; it will provide examples of situations and issues as they relate to interpersonal topics. You can use this lesson if you have a vague idea of what you want, but aren't sure exactly where to start. You may have an idea about a subject, but don't know what to call it, or how to do research to find strategies, activities and information. Perhaps you don't know how your ideas fit within a broader topic, or how to get more information about the subject. You may know your objective, but aren't sure what research has been done before or what ideas and theories are available on the topic. This lesson can help you in these areas.

What You will Do In This Lesson

This lesson will explore issues, topic and situations that fall within the Interpersonal Domain. You will be reading about which topics and issues are relevant or related to Interpersonal Behavior. You’ll participate in activities to match words and concepts with broad interpersonal issues and situations. For example, you may find concepts like, “insensitive boss” or “too much work” or “loneliness” or “anger management” and will see how they relate to broader topics.

You will read about research, activities and theorists who focus on Interpersonal Topics: you’ll read about a specific issue, who wrote about it, and what they discovered or developed on that topic. You’ll also have a chance 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.

Objectives

After completing this course, you will be able to evaluate which topics/issues and situations would be most relevant to your specific objective. To do this, you will be able to distinguish between topics that fall within the Interpersonal Domain and other domains.

After identifying that your instruction is within the “interpersonal” domain, you will be able to compare and contrast various topics, and their related research, in order to select which topics and methods best meet your objectives.

If you have not been assigned a specific topic or task for your project, you will be able to generate ideas from the examples provided in the lesson, to meet your objectives.

After matching your objective with relevant issues and topics within the Interpersonal domain, you will be able to select, create, identify, develop or find activities and strategies related to the topics or issues you select.

You will also be able to integrate suitable ideas and research about Interpersonal Domain topics, into your instructional design plan.