#pedegogy

From the article: "She found that when students get feedback as part of the process of completing an assignment, it gives kids the opportunity to revise their work. The feedback process mans that students must be in constant communication with Tucker about their work. This is in addition to keeping track of what they think they’ve learned through post-lesson reflection tools like learning logs and sketchnotes.

...In the process of helping students assess their own work and advocate for themselves, Tucker realized they also needed to take ownership of communication with their parents about schoolwork. She said it’s unrealistic for one teacher to communicate effectively about learning with 150 families each semester. In that scenario, teachers often communicate only when something is wrong. Tucker decided students should share their progress, or lack thereof, with their families, so she created a template to guide students when emailing their parents."

In a blog entry “Failing by design: How We Make Teaching Too Hard For Mere Mortals” Robert Pondiscio asked a very important question that I think all school disticts should ask themselves: “What is the job of the teacher?”

At first glance, that seems like a really simple question: A teacher should teach. But what does that mean exactly?

Pondiscio writes about how teachers are asked not only to do the actual teaching, but also, in many instances, to locate good instructional materials for a wide range of students in their classes, from those with special needs to those that have advanced needs. These materials that are often not provided by school districts. Indeed, over 94% of teachers responding to a survey indicated that they use Google to locate instructional materials, and over 80% use Pinterest because their school districts do not provide them with adequate, in their opinion, resources. This requires teachers to not only be experts in the subject they (of course), how best to teach a subject (pedegogy), and to create their own lessons (experts in instructional design). While most teachers are subject experts and most are pedagogical experts, most are not instructional design experts.

Pondiscio adds: “Expecting teachers to be expert pedagogues and instructional designers is one of the ways in which we push the job far beyond the abilities of mere mortals. Add the expectation that teachers should differentiate every lesson to meet the needs of each individual student, and the job falls well outside the capacity of nearly all of America's 3.7 million classroom teachers (myself included).” Asking, and expecting teachers to design rigorous lessons for all of the diverse students in their classes, and expecting them to work every time is akin to asking your doctor to not only diagnose your illness, but also make the medicine that you will take as well. Education professor Marcy Stein from University of Washington Tacoma said: ”Few teachers ever take coursework on instructional design and, therefore, have little knowledge of the role it plays in student learning."

Should teachers be expected to not only teach a subject but also to design that which they are teaching? I suppose that there are teachers that can do both, but they are few and far between, much like the chef that can design the menu AND cook the meal.

School districts often turn to services that provide them with ready-made , pre-vetted curriculum. In the past, teachers used textbooks as the curriculum, going from Chapter 1 to Chapter 30 across the year. But with the advent of the internet, the rise of state standards, and the explosion of readily available free information those days are mostly gone, and textbooks are now used mainly as classroom resources and not as a complete curriculum. That is actually a good thing. However, it imposes more work on an already time-stressed teacher.

Pondiscio asks these very relevant questions that I believe all school districts should be asking themselves:

What exactly is the teacher's job, and what is the best use of her limited time? Is it deciding what to teach, or how to teach it?

Is the soul of the work instructional design or instructional delivery? 

Do you want your child’s teacher to have the time to analyze student work and develop a keen eye for diagnosing mistakes and misunderstandings?

Do you want her to give your child rich and meaningful feedback on assignments and homework?

In most districts, the emphasis on professional development is on HOW to teach, not WHAT to teach or even how to choose good lessons. It is assumed that a teacher “knows her stuff” and can teach that to students. It is also assumed that the teacher can vet the material as good or bad, which may be a vast over assumption. Time starved teachers often look for ANYTHING that might seem like a good lesson. Thus the rise of websites like “Teachers Pay Teacher” where educators can literally pay other educators to write lessons for them. One survey found at least half of all teachers spend up to 4 hours a week “looking for appropriate lessons” for their classrooms.

One particular ask of the students is that they must honk about how their work is interpreted by others in different practice areas. Natalie has looked at the way she works and has pushed drawings into moving images previously with some success. As with other students I felt that it would be beneficial for Natalie to look into this process again but with more focus.

This cycling animation is the result of Natalie independently investigating how her images move. For me this is a good result for a student whose level and understanding of animation is at a beginner level. 

I have highlighted that the idea of cycling images (red cape) is fully understood by Natalieand from this, as with the previous students I knew that the purpose and mode of this project would be of interest to her.

The project echoed the work that was done with Chris, we redesigned and animated the result from the previous work. The main focus points were the relationships of how to synchronise movement of two independent assets and how the time line works with imported assets.

We also touched upon how frame by frame animation techniques can me incorporated into a project/project file.

This was a light introduction to software but more importantly opened up possibilities into how a student can further progress their work.

Over the past three weeks and three sessions conducted I feel it is important to reflect on the process of Scholarly Activity and the mode in which I Have thought about it and conducted it.

 Using Boyers model of scholarship will help me to home down how I have been opporating as a scholar. The best way to do this is to simply go through each of the four principles.

Boyers first principle asks:

•    1. The scholarship of discovery that includes original research that advances knowledge.

What am I doing? Is it helping anyone? Yes, it is. The project is about

delivering information to an audience about something that is little know in the form of a video. The condition of Pulmonary Hypertension is little known about. Until this condition came to my attention, admittedly I knew nothing about it, therefore the output for this project, is designed to deliver information to such persons as myself who do not know or hold any prior knowledge about Pulmonary Hypertension.

With this said I am operating with this first principle as the foundations of this project and the outcome that is desired.

 The second principle asks:

2. The scholarship of integration that involves synthesis of information across disciplines, across topics within a discipline, or across time;

Picking this project up again with students does fulfill this principle. Students have created images/designs from primary research. Therefore the synthesis of information has already occurred, it is not about quantifying this information and extra research into a package that can be delivery to a group operating outside of the confines of the academic institution. The PHA UK charity is the final bearer of this projects out and will be of a benefit to them. The learning from the students will benefit a social and medical issue that needs more visibility and awareness in the healthcare system.

 The third principle asks:

The scholarship of application (also later called the scholarship of engagement) that goes beyond the service duties of a faculty member to those within or outside the University and involves the rigor and application of disciplinary expertise with results that can be shared with and/or evaluated by peers.

 This answer was partially answered previously as the, beneficiaries of this outcome will be PHA UK and every piece of diversity in helping them spread their awareness will help. The review of peers is something that I have not had time to address. As an academic this my be classed for me as other colleagues but as students are working with me as partners they are included in the word ‘peer’. The sessions so far are working on a 1:1 basis and that has been acting as myself having the disciplinary expertise to facilitate the students desired outcome. The element of rigor would come from the decisions later on in this process of placing the video together making sure the information within it is communicating correctly.

 Finally the forth principle asks:

The scholarship of teaching and learning that the systematic study of teaching and learning processes. It differs from scholarly teaching in that it requires a format that will allow public sharing and the opportunity for application and evaluation by others.

 Publically facing would be this information that is being read now, and I thank you for making it this far. The purpose of this blog is to document the process of working with students as partners, all out comes and imagery are documented here and available for public viewing.

  On reflection of this project so far I feel that I am working to Boyers Scholarly Model and touching upon them well. Working with students is currently working well as long as student have as much control on the process as I do.

Boyers four principles do make you think about how you create work and the pedagogy involved. My thoughts on these are that it does feel very natural to run any project through these stages, not necessarily in order but as a linchpin for a project such as this, theya re more than useful to refer to.

It’s interesting that students are being taught not to use Wikipedia for research (my 7th grader, collage undergraduates) yet, because it’s “not reliable.” I have issues with this because a) I’m not sure that something published in a print book is necessarily more reliable, b) wikipedia is a more democratic collection of information than a published book would typically be (wikipedia has its own hierarchy, but still) c) students are using it any way. 

The thing to do as an instructor would be to teach students how to use Wikipedia, but in order to do that we would need to understand it better ourselves. 

Here’s an interesting document toward that end: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com/portfolio/project/iraq-war-wikihistoriography/  

It is the "The Iraq War: A History of Wikipedia Changelogs" a twelve-volume printed set of all changes to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq war over a period of time. This document tells a kind of history of the war through the edits, revisions, and vandalism that took place on Wikipedia, including the “talk” page comments explaining the edits. 

At el Museo, I overheard a conversation between two educators on their lesson plans for introducing U.S. slavery to 4th graders. I wish I (or ideally someone even better than I) can be the point person on this type of lesson planning.