Learning learning
Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding
I came across this video this morning (thank you delicious popular links RSS feed). It is mostly a call for constructivism , and contains a more cogent explanation of this than any I remember receiving during my Grad Dip. In fact the film feels very clear and digestible- what you would hope for from educators.
A couple of John Biggs frameworks I hadn’t heard of were mentioned. One (SOLO) is a thinking taxonomy not entirely dissimilar to Bloom’s. The other was his “three levels of thinking about teaching”
Level 1 – What the students are (good students/bad students)
Level 2 – What the teacher does (good teachers, bad teachers)
Level 3 – What students do (the outcomes of the teaching)
This is instantly familiar, although I haven’t seen it before. It ‘rings a bell’. A lot of the language in my school is not exactly “good kid, bad kid” but probably falls into this category: This student is easy to teach, this student needs help, why won’t this student do the work etc.
In a discussion with my line manager and another teacher yesterday about a student, who is doing better in maths than previous experience suggests he should, the conversation was more at level two. Why is this student working well for teacher A but not for teacher B, what are those teachers doing differently.
My position on this spectrum is near the cusp of level one and level two. I know the theory, and where I need to be, but I’m not living it yet.
