My Thanks To …

My thanks go to Michael Josefowicz (twitter: ToughLoveforX) for prompting this post.

Background

Michael posted a piece titled “#ebdish Notice. Focus. Mull. Engage. Learning and Teaching” at http://sellingprint.blogspot.com/2010/08/ebdish-notice-focus-mull-engage.html. It looks at the classroom “learning cycle”. Michael invited me to have a look at it, and if I was so minded to respond to it. This post is my response.

My Own Educational Baggage

My own work as a teacher includes teaching horse riding and information technology, with students from age 6 up to retirees whose minds ranged from being intellectually disabled to far brighter than my own.

The Classroom Learning Cycle

Whenever I walk into a classroom (either physical or virtual) I always know what it is that I would like the students to have understood by the end of the lesson. I also have an outline plan of how I intend to deliver that learning.

Sometimes, the lessons go exactly to plan, but this is unusual. The main reason behind this is that students bring their own life experiences, and their own feelings with them into the classroom. I need to be aware of, and responsive to, such things as female horse riders suffering menorrhagia and Muslim students towards the end of Ramadan: both of these effect the students’ performance. Students can also cause serendipitous moments, which can make the learning go in a completely different direction. Under these circumstances, I abandon my lesson plan, and I do so with complete confidence knowing that I can deliver whatever learning is appropriate and engaging to the students at that moment.

My own classroom cycle is “plan, deliver, observe”, always with a view to what the students need to know by the end of the course.

“Planning” is what goes on inside my head.

“Delivering” could be making statements, asking questions, giving a practical demonstration, using a piece of technology, and such like activities.

“Observing” means observing the totality of the students’ responses, both at the individual level, and as a body. It includes not just listening to what they say and how they say it, but also observing their body language. This feeds straight back into my planning.

Depending on the tempo of the class, this cycle happens anything between a few times and up to 30 times every minute, the higher figure applying when the class is doing a practical when I spend most of my time just observing and planning (“Do I need to talk to that student, or should I let him struggle?”).

A Final Thought

As I was planning this post, there was at the back of my mind the issue of “lock-step teaching” where every child is taught the same thing at the same point in the school year across an entire legislature. My own reaction to this is “What a disastrous way to run an education system!”: it is treating children as automata, and you might as well replace teachers with robots.