You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21. Part 22, Part 23

It is a pretty slack 3rd trimester of study for my Masters of Teaching... I only have a single STEM teaching unit (STEM teaching in the Middle Years) which is proving to be a mix of interesting and rehashing familiar grounds for contructivist models of teaching. The course is incredibly well structured and laid out in the online presentation... something that not all courses have done well in, and when you are studying online... well, it is hugely important!

Unfortunately, the tutorial times are at a terrible time for tuning in from the other side of the world (It is in the morning in Australia... which is somewhere in the middle of the night in Europe!)... so, it means that I don't get to drop into the live discussions. But I do get to listen to the recorded tutorials... which can actually be nicer sometimes, as I can speed up the play speed to 1.25 or 1.5 times to get through it a bit faster.

So far, the unit has been interesting in teaching me about how we have to change our teaching methods when kids are progressing between the primary and secondary stages of education. It is a rough time for them, changing schools and changing bodies... and the change in the perception of themselves as children to young adults. Plus... they don't all do it all together as a block...they do it in their own time, so over these few years, you can have a wide range of progression in the growth of these proto-adults!

All of which means that it can be a bit tricky for teachers to adequately engage and educate! The unit has both students that are specialising in primary and secondary teaching... I'm coming from the secondary teaching side, so we are mostly learning about how to cope with the latter end of the children's transition, whilst the primary teachers are learning more about how to transition the children to being more independent. Unfortunately, it is also a transition time where there won't be a single teacher that can help transition the children throughout the whole process... although, there seems to have been some success in pastoral groups that private schools have the resources to develop. Hopefully that is something that can be rolled out properly to public schools as well!

One of the courses that I did last trimester was the Literacy and Numeracy course... and although the ideas and concepts from the course were interesting, the presentation and delivery of the course was pretty poor. It is the only time that I have submitted a student review of the course... and I was not happy, despite the fact that I got through with decent marks.

Anyway... last night, I was teaching one of my students over Zoom (I'm travelling at the moment.... but I can still do private teaching via the internet! One benefit of the pandemic is that it has made this an acceptable thing to do!) and she was struggling to write a lab report... which started to remind me about some of the things that I was taught in the Literacy/Numeracy course.

As we start to teach students the subject specific literacy and specific forms of communication that are relevant to our subjects, we need to scaffold them from what they know (primary/general literacy) through to the subject specific (secondary) literacy that is appropriate for our fields. So, in terms of Maths and Physics, it is the different sorts of words and lab report that we need to expose them to in order for them to communicate effectively and efficiently in our fields.

Part of doing this is gradually exposing the students to the forms, dissecting and analysing worked examples... and then providing them initially with templates with which they can start getting accustomed to the format. In the end, they should be able to fly free without all of these initial scaffolds and crutches... but they are highly necessary at the start to assist in the learning and mastery of new communication forms.

So, apparently the teacher of this particular student had dumped this lab report and practical on the class... and the students had not the faintest idea what each of the sections meant. Of course, if you are familiar with the form... it is obvious what to write in the Introduction, Aims, Methods, Conclusions and all of that sort of thing. But if you are new to this... well, it is at best a concrete wall. Like anything new, it is a complete mystery... until you nut it out yourself (inefficient), or have a guide to assist with decoding the the new style/format.

So, that is something that I have started to notice in myself. Much of the stuff that I learn in the Masters of Teaching course is pretty abstract and theoretical at best, with very little in the way of hints as to how to implement the otherwise good-sounding ideas. I guess much of that will come in the practicals when we are actually placed at schools.

However, I have noticed that I start to take more interest in the way that I teach... seeing if I can tweak certain little things to make the content and understanding a bit more stickier for the student. I do suppose that that is the main reason for learning these things... integrating the knowledge into ourselves and then being introspective enough to see flaws and possible improvements for the way that we teach... and of course, bringing a little bit more clarity and understanding into the things that we do do well at an intuitive level. s

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