Creative Design Solutions in the Traditional Classroom

Since I'm not currently working as an Instructional Designer but as a teacher, I find myself connecting these articles to my classroom experience. Designers being forced to use standard templates seems to be a concern, but if a designer incorporates some creativity and thinking "outside the box," these templates can become engaging and help provide some relevant instruction to the learner. In the traditional classroom, teachers are often required to present content based on standards and sometimes even be given material that must be taught verbatim out of a textbook.
An example of this would deal with test preparation. Our districts subscribe to series that claim to be the best at preparing students for the PSSA tests. The content is standard but the delivery and scripts involved in teaching it from the books leaves something to be desired. Teachers, on a weekly basis, must find ways to present this information and testing strategies in a creative manner that will hold students' attention. It was an good point that Kabrene made about instructional designers in the corporate world having to whiz through ADDIE in such short amounts of time, but classroom educators also sometimes have a short turnaround time between units and lessons where creative strategies need to be adjusted. Not that we have to go through the ADDIE model every time (thank god), but we are constantly designing a lesson, developing and performing it, and then reflecting and evaluating.