The usefulness of models of instruction for planning, delivery and analyzing lessons has always been a controversial issue. Typically two opposing point of views exist. One extreme standpoint is that good models of instruction, if they do exist, should provide teachers with specific guidelines how to design and deliver lessons. The other, a rather deconstructive view is that models of instruction are just for cutting a fine figure of using theoretical ideas in teaching. The attempts to create models of instruction that teacher could use as universal guidelines for designing lessons have almost a 200-year long history. Herbart introduced one of the first widely known models of instruction. A modified version of it foresaw that every instructional unit consisted of the phases of preparation, presentation, association, systematization, and application (Brubacher, 1966, p. 213). Hunter (1982) and Rosenshine (1983) elaborated two contemporary lesson models known as mastery teaching and direct instruction. Yet, experimental studies have not evidenced effectiveness (in terms of pupils learning gains) of these or other models as direct and universal guides to good teaching (f. ex. Krull, Oras, and Pikksaar; under review). On this ground we raised a hypothesis that lesson models could serve rather as analytic tools for understanding instruction than be used as prescriptive guidelines for lesson design. In order to prove this claim we focused on the potential role of Gagné’s (1985) model of critical instructional events in student teachers’ lesson planning and analysis reports. The Gagné’s model was chosen as it conceives teaching, in clearly psychological terms, as supporting learner’s internal psychological processes (motivation, cognitive and metacognitive processes) necessary for learning to occur. Our recent study (Krull. Oras, and Sisask, 2007) of beginning and experienced teachers’ perception and thinking of lesson events revealed that experienced teachers perceive significantly more teacher activities related to implementing all instructional events as reflected in Gagné’s lesson model than the beginning teachers. The discovered “deficiency” in novice teachers’ perceptions and understanding of instructional events inspired experimentation with training of student teachers’ lesson analysis skills in the light of a modified version of the Gagné’s model of instructional events. This study (Krull, Oras, and Pikksaar; under review) showed that a special training of lesson analysis skills increased the student teachers’ perception of many lesson events in a videotaped lesson that was used for testing purposes.

In our ongoing study we interviewed student teachers on how they designed lessons that they taught, asked them to comment on video-recordings of these lessons and to explain whether and how they implemented Gagné’s instructional events in these lessons. The preliminary analysis of these interviews and comments reveals that student teachers are aware of the importance of implementing critical instructional events in their lessons and they can explain their instructional decisions that they already made in the light of the necessity of delivering these events but none of them admitted that they would follow precisely this model when preparing for teaching.

The results of our former and current study convince that the Gagné’s and other similar models of instruction are helpful for a deeper understanding teaching in terms of creating favorable conditions for learning, and their use as a framework conception in planning and analyzing instruction is beneficial but their consideration as a precise rule for lesson design tends to cause formalism and is not justified.