Reflections Week 2

Week 2 Reflections:

Hello everyone and welcome to another installment of...this blog. Riveting stuff I know but the topics of this week have been rather interesting to learn. We had a bit of a look at good pedagogical practices, several teaching frameworks to help us along the way and an introduction to wikis with a very useful activity involving coloured hats. So without further delay I'd like to discuss a little question that's been nagging at me.

What defines good pedagogy? This is a question that every new teacher is sure to ask at some point and the answers are just as complex as you imagined. However the more I read about pedagogy, I find the same recurring principles that can make the difference between positive learning outcomes and negative ones. These principles start with KNOWING your students, and I mean really know them, not just names but who they are as people. This allows you to create content which is relevant to their interests and primary Discourse (I've been reading about literacy, I really like the term Discourse), thus engaging the students interest in learning. Finally as they are invested this allows you as the teacher to challenge them more and encourage higher order thinking skills, thus maximising the learning experience. Sounds easy right?

Anything can sound simple if you deconstruct it to base principles. But we are talking about teenagers here, and a teenagers identity can flip with the change of a hat (De Bono's joke) as they are at a point in their lives where they are still figuring out who they are in relation to the world. Thus the knowing of our students is an incredibly complex task, one that needs to be kept on top of lest we lose their interest. Without this principle, the rest of the good pedagogy process becomes extremely difficult.

As such, I've been thinking of teaching practices I might employ to stay on top of this and I think I'd like to have a short constructivism session at the beginning of every lesson. Whether this is a KWL on the new material being presented, communal homework submission or just a general Q&A, I think this will allow me to gauge the mood of the class before I even begin and have an inkling as to how the lesson will go before I start. It will also enable me to hopefully pick up any changes in students personalities so I can better plan my lessons. If nothing else it encourages class participation from the get go and will hopefully carry them through the inevitable lecture component I just know I won't be able to avoid. Thoughts? While you mull that over, I'm going to give my lecture on the teaching frameworks we have learnt this week.

This week we were introduced to a couple of teaching frameworks, the Blooms Taxonomy and the SAMR framework. These are two very useful devices for teachers to create suitable assessment and learning activities for the classroom. So let's take a look at them

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First we were introduced to Blooms taxonomy, otherwise known as the taxonomy of educational objectives. Devised by Benjamin Bloom and published in 1956, this taxonomy is a means of homogenising the learning experience by classifying and giving specific meaning to educational goals and what students learn from teachers instruction. It also allows for a contrast between each educational institutions courses against the national curriculum and as such is used by many teachers as a measure of devising relevant assessment. Based off the three domains of educational learning, familiar to many from their report cards as Knowledge, Skills and Attitude, the taxonomy provides a breakdown on each of these, establishing another tier system of learning, the bottom categories needing to be mastered before the top tiers can be effectively accessed. An example of the cognitive (Knowledge) domain is demonstrated above as a tier pyramid.


After this we look at the SAMR model for technological innovation. A bit simpler in its application, this model refers to ICT's and how their implementation by teachers enhances the learning experience. In this technology driven world it is assumed that using technology features in the classroom allow for a wider variety of teaching resources to be developed to aid in the learning experience.

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This model gives an overview of just how much of an effect they have. Starting from the basic substitution and augmentation where using tech provides very little in the way of actual functional improvement beyond perhaps storage, formatting and accessibility regardless of geographical location, many of the tasks that fall in this category can be just as easily done with pen and paper. These levels are known as enhancement. Beyond this we have the realms of transformative, starting in modification, whereby there is significant redesign of the task in the form of technology, allowing simple features that other methods would struggle to apply. Redefinition, the final frontier of technological application is where a task or activity would NOT be possible without the relevant tech. 

I'm beginning to notice a pattern in pedagogical concepts and their love of tiered framework. This makes sense on reflection as it is the goal of teachers to design good pedagogy that encourages higher order thinking, which by its definition needs to build on lower order thinking. As such correlations between the two frameworks explored this week can be made, and as fortune would have it, is an almost direct link.

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Substitution and remembering are simple rote learning exercises much like behaviourism learning theory explored last week. Here you are simply copy/pasting onto a different format, maybe learning a little about the tech but ultimately just fluffing around. This covers projectors displaying the information so you save time writing on the board, while time efficient, does nothing for the students.

Augmentation, while still very simple, requires some limited understanding of the tool being used and the material being manipulated. This area covers manipulating the formatting and presentation of the material, applying your knowledge of the students so as to better engage them in the learning experience, and as such, applying a cognitivist learning method. Examples of this include power points, implementing videos or fun images to keep students interested.

The Modification phase of the SAMR model definitely requires analysis of the tool to make it function. The nature of the design of ICT's in the Modification tier means that their use is in application of knowledge. The example given in the video of the spreadsheet is an example of constructivism also, scaffolding and building on fellow students work to generate the suitable result. This also means there is a notion of evaluation at hand as the data entered needs to be assessed for relevance and consistency with the task or the program will not perform correctly (You ever divided by zero somewhere in a 2000+ point data spread...the whole thing bricks). Naturally examples of this included blogs or wikis that the students can engage in, communal activities like concept maps that can be modified and altered.

Finally Redefinition, being completely reliant on technology makes this the very definition of connectivism. As a teacher, using this technology means designing and evaluating things like an interactive webpage, games or online classrooms. I think pedagogies designed around this allows students to continue their own study outside of school time, perhaps due to the activities being homework assigned but I see it having very limited use inside of class time as connectivism effectively removes the teacher from the equation, and I just think that in class time can be better spent. Just my two cents on that one..

De Bonos thinking hats

No learning experience is complete without some form of interactive activity with which we can apply our knowledge and trigger higher order thinking. This week we participated in a wiki space utilizing the de Bono thinking hats concept in an effort to tackle the contentious issue of mobile phones in the classroom.

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he concept itself, takes our understanding of a topic, makes us smash it into pieces then forces us into a higher tier of the bloom cognitive model by making us reassess our knowledge through six modes of thought process, demonstrated pictorially by six coloured hats. (see above) The method encourages lateral thinking in the student by getting them to analyse the topic through different methods, usually by asking a set of questions designed to encourage each particular thought process. This broadens the mindset and can often reveal aspects of the topic you never thought possible. For example with this mobile phone issue, I have always been a firm believer that mobile phones can lead to nothing but trouble in the class, overshadowing whatever so called advantage they can bring to the learning experience. But now I have the notion that it will probably happen anyway and I now gripe about what control measures need to be in place before it can be implemented. These thoughts had never occurred to me before.

We were given this task in the form of a wiki which we all contribute to, and thus build a database of knowledge we can relate back to. From this there were countless examples of those "so called" advantages such as using the GPS feature mentioned by Johanna or using it for scheduling, timetable changes (Leanne mentioned this) or if the parents desperately need to contact the student.  These out of the box suggestions haven't swayed me to think mobiles in class are appropriate but they have widened my perspective of how they can still be utilized outside of the classroom to the benefit of the students. As such the wiki built upon the hats concept and allowed for even further stretching of thoughts, not only thinking about the topic from individual hats but expanding upon this with other peoples hats.

The overall process jumps up the Blooms taxonomy, going from an application activity to an analysis one.  The hats concept is a perfect example of cognitivism at work, making students adopt the hats themselves and apply their own thoughts makes them automatically relate it back to themselves, and thus are already on the road to engagement in the activity. Most people will favour one thought process naturally so getting them to adopt others triggers high order thinking and empathy processes that they normally would not consider.

The wiki itself however, while a good demonstration of social connectivism, can be at best described as a Augmentation SAMR process. This only due to the need use different coloured text in order to distinguish your own work, and that the many pages are conveniently located. Otherwise this activity could very easily be done on paper with coloured pens. However the obvious improvement this technology makes to the De Bonos hat concept shows that even the lower order forms of tech can make a dramatic improvement to the learning experience if implemented correctly.

References:

R. Henderson (2013) Teaching Literacies in the middle years. (pp 139-140) South Melbourne, Victoria, Oxford University Press

Krathwohl D.R.(2002)A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview

THEORY INTO PRACTICEVol  41 Issue 4 pg212

Lisa Hogan (2011) SAMR - A Model for Instructional Technology Use. Youtube video