On a trick or treat?
For All Hallows' Eve.
Thoughts (mainly about learning and teaching)
which may or may not lead somewhere.
You can also read the comments from New Scientist's reporting here.
I'm semi-retired, and I have a little discretionary time. So I use Google Reader to aggregate updates from a range of blogs and sites of interest. Indeed, you may well be reading this via such a portal.
The link is to a blog about a conference; "Workshop on the Impacts of Pen based Technology in Education". Naively I thought we knew most of what there is to know about the use of pens in education; granted they only really superseded slates (oh! perhaps that is what they mean by "tablets") and styluses in primary schools early in the last century, but if you count quills, they have been around in schools for hundreds of years...
Two recent incidents;
...The first paragraph of this essay contained five sentences, some run-on. The second paragraph of this essay was made up of only one sentence. It is my understanding that in many American High schools, this concise, accurate, and very clear one sentence paragraph would not be allowed in any student wiring (in English class or Science class) because it breaks a rule. The rule is that a paragraph has five or more sentences. WTF?.There are various ways in which one might profitably "reflect" on this, from spluttering exasperation to a consideration of how it illustrates the perverse consequences of a "restrictive solution"... but all of them are likely to lead to the conclusion that the supposed "knowledge base" of a discipline has totally lost touch with practice.
I find this rule to be profoundly disturbing. [...] it does symbolize much of what is wrong about our system of education in general. This rule solves a problem (students not thinking enough about what they are writing) and in the process ruins the teaching of good communication. Similar arbitrary and capricious rule making plagues each area of our educational system.
The substance of this is not my main territory, but the process interests me.
OK, it happened, and indirect feeedback via a colleague who could not attend but who spoke to people after the event was that it had been well-received, even remarked on as a "proper academic lecture" (not sure whether or not that is a compliment!)
Labels: communication, feedback, learning styles, practice, praxis, process and content, reflection, teaching
I'll get round to evaluating that lecture some time soon, but just to fill out the content, here's the resource page to support it.
I have been asked to step in to do a single one-hour lecture to about 200 Secondary PGCE students tomorrow on "Major Theories of Learning", for reasons which don't matter. So I thought it might help concentrate my mind, and give some hostages to fortune (this is before the event, and I'll post afterwards, too), if I "talked through" some of my thoughts with whoever is out there.
Apart from the self-evident fact that this is egregious bullsh*t (don't you think that the asterisk is overworked?), that is only self-evident to 40-year denizens of the swamp like me...Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? I've just been in correspondence with a student elsewhere who has been very critical, in public (a mistake) about one of his lecturers, who clearly knows a lot about teaching, but has not connected that with how s/he does it.
Teaching is an applied discipline. So is engineering. To what extent can the discipline of engineering be applied to the theory and practice of teaching? This is an old question, but I'm enjoying engaging in a dialogue with a clearly accomplished and thoughtful engineer who has been teaching for some time, but has finally grasped the nettle of undertaking a PGCE/DTLLS, and has been less than impressed with what the course has had to offer...
I've just been channel-hopping and came across Teachers' TV. It was citing an example of an "outstanding" lesson on elementary geometry for, I guess, 9-year-olds. "Outstanding" is Ofsted's term, by the way.
Labels: curriculum, teaching, unintended consequences, values