Graham's+page

23 July 2009


 * Reflections on effective pegagogy in action**

Q. 1. I think effective pedagogy is happening when our students are learning. This part of the NZC lists various methods or systems to minimise why students should fail to learn.So effective pedagogy is when we have the majority of these happening and students are making good progress in their learning.

Q. 2. I have used the following.

i. Connections to prior learning and experience. Most science topics are taught in a logical manner where what is taught in one lesson leads on to the next topic, or covers the same thing in more depth. Before launching into volumetric titrations I told my class where I had done this activity and why, e.g. salt tests for chesse, butter, sauces, etc; acidity levels in dressings; cleaning chemical levels in factory automated cleaning systems. When teaching circular motion (Year 12 physics) I showed a PowerPoint on how industrial separation systems used circular motion.

ii. Providing sufficient opportunities to learn. My Year 11 class was struggling with balancing chemicalequations, so we took 2 lessons to go over the techniques and practice them beofre moving on with the unit plans. This was time well spent and it showed that almost everyone in the class had difficulty doing this.

Q. 3. I can easily use the following.

i. Making connections to prior learning and experience. This involves mainly linking to other areas of the subject curriculum, or sometimes to other school subjects. In my case I can also talk about my experience from working in various industrial places where the topic may be relevant.

ii. Providing sufficient opportunities to learn. I think I can easily adjust the timing to cover areas where the concepts are not being grasped. The problem may be in not always recognising that an issue exists, and this will have to be one area where I need to learn to pick up on the clues.

Q. 4.

i. Encouraging reflective thought and action. I will need to teach the students how to do this, and will probably need to do more of it myself. I will need to design or plan ways for students to regularly monitor their progress.

ii. Facilitate shared learning. Although chemistry practical work tends to be done in groups (mainly to save cost?) I am not sure that shared learning actually happens. I suspect the shared learning talked about is more about having people other than the teacher doing part of the teaching, or about the students themselves teaching each other through guided discussions or group work.

Q. 5.

Creating a supportive learning environment.

My question is about how do we as teachers build a "caring, inclusive" environment while we are teaching a group of 20-30 people? If the class is bordering on disruptive a lot of the time, how can we care for those struggling when our energies are being used to prevent chaos? (I don't personally expect my classes to reflect this, but this would be a worst case scenario.)

If I have 1 or 2 students who are showing no interest at all, how do I try to get them on board and up to speed? What happens when the student says they are only here because they are too young to leave, but they will be gone in 4 months? I have seen cases like this in TE2 and the teacher let them sit in the corner as long they didn't disrupt the class.

I suspect it boils down to what is the best use of my time and energy. Are there some students that you are never going to help despite what you do and the school try to do? If the student does not care and the parents don't care, what can I do?

This is a summary of Reading 34 from the Block Course.