ED 640 Teaching Reflection – Liam Breathnach

It is a strange year in terms of how much is going on with Grad School, little Tommy and keeping going teaching the students, but I am really reflecting on how I can change the normal set up of my teaching to put more onus on the students. I think if I can focus on the skills such as research and note taking then they will be more able to learn the content themselves. With time constraints I am not really implementing new ideas too much but I have a word document set up for recording any ideas for future plans or ideas. This week we had a half day PD day on Thursday and our classes were all shortened. I had not thought about that when planning, so I made a last minute decision to group the students and have them find websites to research organelle functions rather than going through the powerpoint. I was pleasantly surprised how it went! Students were in groups of three with 2 researchers and 1 note taker. I switched the note taking role every few minutes. Then I would ask for a function of an organelle, write it on the board, and have a quick discussion about it. How is the wording? Have we left anything out? The class seemed engaged, and we had a board full of good functions for the organelles. I took pictures and have emailed them to the students. And the powerpoint is still available to them, so they will have plenty of resources!

It is a well-known fact that students tend to have short attention span, like variety and benefit when there is some dynamism in the classroom (Bellanca and Brandt, 2010, Snowman and McCown, 2015). For these reasons it is very important that the class is well broken up. There should be little sections, focused on the objectives, with times in between for students to assimilate the content and show they are absorbing it. So there should be a section for discovery or learning, some time to discuss and absorb the material and then an assessment, formative or summative, where the teacher can gauge the success of the students in meeting the objectives and then refine the instruction as necessary.  

There are a variety of ways a teacher can break up the class in such a manner. If the content comes first and is imparted by the teacher, there can be a class discussion or small group discussion about the content and how it is applicable and related to previous knowledge. A full class discussion or visiting each group would give the teacher some feedback on student progress and when they are ready a task could be assigned where students would have to apply their learning in order to complete it. In a more discovery based plan, the students could start with the task, and then could discuss as a group the hows and whys in order to explain the task they have just completed. In either scenario it would be worthwhile to have the students interact with other groups to see if there are different routes of ideas students used to complete the task.

Thanks

References

Bellanca, J. & Brandt, R. (2010). 21^st Century Skills; Rethinking How Students Learn. Solution Tree Press

McCown, R. & Snowman, J. (2015). Psychology Applied to Teaching (14th ed.). Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning