Week 4 ed 2135 (2007-03-31)

Piaget: Constructivism

Vygotsky: Social Interaction is king.

Piaget - knowledge is a scheme - we modify our scheme throughout our lives


Group discussion models:
Jigsaw
Think, Pair, Share

Group discussions: source of riots and wasted time if not managed

TPS:
Stage1: Thinking
Get the person ready to learn: into Zone of Proximal Development
- must get them to think to get them into the ZPD

What are the characteristics of a good, effective, efficient group discussion?

All of the members need to have a role, or something to contribute otherwise some will feel left out and will sabotage the group by being distracting, or deliberately provocative.

The topic of discussion must be relevant and/or interesting for the members of the group - or there must be some motivation to get involved (reward/punishment? eg 'will I look stupid if I don't put in here?')

To be effective the group members must have enough background information to enable them all to move forwards - ie they should be primed equally in some way. Members should be able to identify components, define terms - ie

To be efficient, there should be a clear expectation of realistic goals and timeframe for the discussion.

Members of the group must feel safe, respected, heard

Members should have practice in group work so they know how to stay on task, stick to procedure, record findings

Do groups need a leader - nominated/self selected?

Remind groups to stay on task/track

Better to select groups, than allow groups to self select - gets people together who are not normally together. Otherwise the points of view will be too similar





Good book
'Becoming an Effective Teacher' Tony Featherston
To be good, the participants need to leave the discussion going 'wow'.

ED 2135 - Intro to teaching skills (2007-03-03)

Sat 3/3/2007

Australia falling behind in 26 country oecd education measure (pisa group)

Not teaching students to analyse, synthesize, evaluate, apply, creative solution (blooms)

Top - Finland (greatest number of students at the highest level)

Why do people come to small schools/steiner etc - more creativity, more activity, smaller numbers, energy

Must have a balance - need solid underpinning for creativity to work. English, Maths, Science, History, ICT (Labour party manifesto). For this to work the students need to work at the higher order thinking levels. Labour docs refer to the 'knowledge economy' which is old knews should be working towards the 'creative economy' (ala China)

Excercise 'Think, Pair, Share": looking at national education policy in an article in the Inquirer (Weekend Australian) March 3 - 4 2007 p25. 'Labor the lesser evil'

The article 'dams with faint praise'. The national curriculum as outlined be Labour seems to have lost all connections with creativity. True we do need strong foundations in Maths, Science, English, History. But if we don't have the ability to synthesise and be creative this knowledge stays dry and will not have the 'international competetive advantage' that Labor is looking for. Liberals seem to be even worse - not having a description of the detail of their national curriculum push.

The 'high' points of culture, Art, Dance, Drama, etc are early victims of a conservative squeeze. 'Back to basics' - good academic students = good workers = growing economy.

Creating a growing 'knowledge economy' which leads to a growing 'real economy' requires investment in job sectors - why study science if there are very few real jobs available?

Get back to the original source. Labor party document:

"New directions for our schools" - could not find this document on the ALP site.

www.alp.org.au

more on JIGSAW (tapping into anxiety to not look bad)

1. Establish six-member groups

2. Allocate a common task that students read and become familiar with

3. Each student in each group is given a topic (either by the teacher or group within the common task on which to become an expert.

4. After some time gathering information, experts with similar topics from each group meet to study further their assigned topic.

5. These expert students then return to their groups to share what they have learned.

Learning by Teaching - Integrate and synthesise in your own mind - forced into the highest order of thinking by having to teach it.