Thursday, December 24, 2015
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Restoring Humanity to Teaching, and Delight to Our Classrooms - Education Week
Restoring Humanity to Teaching, and Delight to Our Classrooms - Education Week
I have resolved to put less self worth into my students’ test scores, and more into the degree of excitement and curiosity I see in their faces each day.I have made time to find out what my students like about our class, what they don’t, and why. One of the simplest ways to do this is the “Stoplight” activity, where students write one thing they want you to keep doing, one thing they want you to stop doing, and one thing they want you to start doing.
As a result, I took down the behavior chart this year. I have found ways to teach my students to work hard and be kind to one another without resorting to punishments or prizes. Being a teacher is harder now, but it’s better, too.
I love Philip Pullman’s line that “Responsibility and delight can co-exist.”
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
Monday, November 23, 2015
Google Form Culture of Learning
Moodle MOOC 7 (MM7) takes place from November 1 - 30, 2015
on Moodle for Teachers.
The purpose of the MOOC is to connect for
instruction and learning, personal and professional development, best practices
and challenges involved in teaching with technology.
This is my introduction to the MM7 session on WizIQ.
Friday, November 20, 2015
What is pair teaching? What are its benefits and drawbacks?
Index Terms—Pair
teaching, pair lecturing, team teaching, reflective practice,
reflection-in-action, constructive alignment, teacher development.
Pair lecturing
enables a more thorough reflection-on-action since the teaching experience is
shared with a pair professor. It also allows
deeper reflection-in-action, incorporating student interaction into the lecture
plan while keeping the assessment methods and the teaching activities
affiliated with the course objectives.
A quick search on
the phrase “pair teaching “using Google
or Scholar gives many definitions.
According to Pair Teaching – an eXtreme Teaching Practice by Roy Andersson and Lars Bendix
https://www.lth.se/fileadmin/lth/genombrottet/konferens2006/Insp06-final.pdf
Pair Teaching, is
working with a partner who can help and support you during some or all of four
fundamental values: Feedback, Communication, Respect, and Courage.
Pair Teaching is
highly repetitious or frequentative and covers some specific practices. The
objective of cooperation is to support the improvement of student learning.
The partner is
supposed to help verify the whole process of going through all of the stages of
the learning cycle – and carry on doing it.
In the general
remarks, we read about the eXtreme Programming concept.
The Pair
Programming practice of eXtreme Programming uses the model of a driver, who
does the work and takes care of the details, and a navigator, who observes,
comments, asks questions, makes suggestions and,
in general, takes care of the big picture. Additionally, it recommends
switching between the roles of driver and navigator within a pair. There is
also the suggestion that taking turns should apply to the practice of Pair
Teaching.
The considerable standard definitions of Pair Teaching have
absolutely nothing to do with the real setting of teaching in pairs (some of
the hits deals with teaching pairs). Pair Teaching is not a well-known and
well-defined concept. Searching instead for “team|group|collaborative teaching”
gives the impression that these are the words or phrases that are frequently
used because of its recurrence popularity.
However, by
insisting on the use of Pair, we want to stress the difference between two
people solving a task and a group of people building a product (student
learning) and for which they might make use of PT or collaborative teaching.
The
cost-effectiveness of Pair Programming is observable, in part, because the two
activities (writing the code and reviewing the code) are carried out in
parallel. In point of fact that there is no tradition of accurate reflection on teaching in PT, we have to rely more on the
benefits to justify the added costs of two people presence. Furthermore, the
pair will also be able to take care of larger groups than one person.
Teaching a course
together seems to have more benefits than drawbacks.
In conclusion,
teaching should not be a solitaire activity, but something that is done in
pairs. Done the right way, Pair Teaching can bring many benefits that
compensate the additional costs.
Some of these
benefits are immediate and explicit – like having someone to brainstorm with,
someone who can help “sort out” your ideas, the possibility to handle larger
groups of students and the ability to step in for each other in the case of
absence. However, most paybacks are more long-term benefits.
Alternatively,
“hidden” glitches – like communicating information, assuring quality aspects,
educating colleagues are significant. It is important to put an accurate value
also to these benefits when judging if Pair Teaching is cost-effective or not.
REFERENCES
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., eXtreme Teaching, in proceedings of 3: ePedagogiska Inspirationskonferensen, LTH, Lund, May 31, 2005.
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., Towards a Set of eXtreme Teaching Practices, in proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science Education, Koli, Finland, November 17-20, 2005.
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., eXtreme Teaching – a Framework for Continuous Improvement, to appear in Journal of Computer Science Education, 2006.
- Beck, K.: Extreme Programming Explained – Embrace Change, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2005.
- Boyer, E., L., Scholarship Reconsidered. Priorities of the Professoriate, The Carnegie Foundation, 1990.
- Hedin, G., Bendix, L., Magnusson, B., Teaching eXtreme Programming to Large Groups of Students, Journal of Systems and Software, January 2005.
- Kolb, D. A., Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning, Prentice-Hall, 1984.
- Pair teaching in preservice teacher education P Medgyes, E Nyilasi - Foreign Language Annals, 1997 - Wiley Online Library
- Medgyes, P. and Nyilasi, E. (1997), Pair Teaching in Preservice Teacher Education. Foreign Language Annals, 30: 352–368. doi: 10.1111/j.1944-9720.1997.tb02358.x
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