EDUC60 - nov 2 - lecture notes

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Tags: education, UCSC

Ideas about teaching:

  • Pedagogical content knowledge
  • Culturally responsive teaching
  • Teacher as facilitator
  • Teacher learning
  • Teacher learning communities

Community of practices

  • Common ways of doing things, common structure of teaching

Quick review

  • Behaviorism and teaching

    • a response to a stimulus is enforced
    • vs teaching - positive and negative reinforcement techniques

  • Constructivism

    • teacher is guide or facilitator
    • work that ZPD!
    • research what students know
    • hands-on problem solving
    • open-ended questions

  • Community of practice

    • shared language and practices
    • establish, promote and understand student communities
    • provide scaffolding/mentoring
    • scaffolding = diagnosing of ZPD; hinting, leading question based on what student already knows
    • the best assessment occurs in the practice

Pedagogical knowledge

  • of subject matter
  • of students' understanding
  • of curricula
  • of general pedagogy

Content knowledge

  • of subjects
  • of relationships among subjects
  • of methods of acquiring and applying knowledge

Culturally responsive teaching

  • who are my students? where do they live? what are typical parental occupations? what "funds of knowledge" are family members able to share
  • funds of knowledge = intersting important ideas that individual haves which are not parts of school
  • build outside knowledge into curriculum, goes back to knowing how people learn

Teacher as facilitator vs didactic

  • having students contribute from their own experiences
  • involves some kind of egalitarian effort

"Teaching for understanding" paper, by Perkins

  1. Make learning a long-term, thinking-centered process
  2. Provide rich ongoing assesment
  3. Support learning with powerful representations
  4. Pay heed to developmental factors
  5. Induct students into the discipline
    • e.g. think like historians
  6. Teach for transfer
    • e.g. use information in more than one setting

We all need to be reflective, lifelong learners.

Teacher learning communities

  • Mutual Support
  • Shared Focus
  • Individual Investigations of Topics of Interest
  • Discussion of Selected Reading
  • Conference Presentations and writing for Publication

Oakes critical against "let's fix teaching" mentality. She is arguing about offering opportunity and making social justice a reality rather than "fixing" and "improving."

  • encourage students to ask

    • whose interest is being served?
    • whose interest is being ignored?

  • think about this whenever you are asked to do something (e.g. in class)

Essay prompt:

"Provide arguments to make a case either for or against large lecture format teaching (a forced dichotomy).

Use learning theory and reading on teaching and learning environment design to support your arguments - be specific. Indicated why the selected theory is useful, i.e. don't just list it.

You do not need to cite every coinceivable theory or article/chapter. Please be selective but pointed. I want to see that you have digested the material and can use it in a new situation (transfer)."

Address the implications beyond yourself and UCSC. Use 3-5 sources.