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only connect - progress - PEDAGOGY | |
Another very loose definition of a title here. Pedagogy will, in this case, cover pretty much anything to do with the way we organised and delivered learning experiences to the students. So, you will find a lot here about organising work as well as the work itself - this will cross over with other areas
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Aims |  |
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I need to think about my aim very carefully here - what exactly is it I
want to do from an educational standpoint? Actually, this has turned out to be
quite a dangerous area in one particular sense - it's been important to keep a
grip on the fact that I'm interested not in improving all of education, but
just the educational experience of eight specific students. Moreover, I may not
even be expecting to actually 'improve' that experience, I may only be able to
have a quantitative rather than qualitative effect; i.e. it may actually be
worse, but there will be more of it. It is quite a difficult idea to deal with - when faced with the huge sweetshop the internet offers and are told you can only have sprouts. However, sprouts are good for you (and you know it) and if it's sprouts or nothing you'd better have sprouts. It took quite a while (as detailed elsewhere) for myself and the tutors to stop staring at Sugar Candy Mountain and head for Sproutsville, but dull though it was, it was there that the treasure was buried (even if it was just more sprouts). |
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Sample scheme of work | |
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 In the section on Progress>Students you will see an
account of how we used organisational change to attempt to improve the return
rate of the work we were setting. As I took over the position of tutor this
gave me an opportunity to look at ways in which changing the actual nature of
the work might also encourage the students to complete it. It seemed to me that
if we were to create such a change we needed to look at the possible reasons
for non-return of work.Appropriateness We are working with a very wide ability range in this group. Aged 13 - 15 is the start of that, but they also have a wide variety of levels of schooling and ability in different subject areas. If we are to provide experiences to all that are age and ability appropriate there are two major changes we can make. Either we form sub-groups based on ability for each piece of work, or we create work is 'self-differentiating'. As part of the underlying remit of the project is to maximise use of tutor time, the former approach could turn out to be rather self-defeating, so I looked for an area that would allow the same activity to be accessible at different levels. On investigation is became clear that one of the curricular gaps experienced by the students was PSE (personal and social education) along with perhaps more general creative activities - the focus being on basic skills and/or preparation of GCSE exams. I decided to look at the areas of creativity and PSE. Structure A second guess at what might be holding things up involved looking at the structure of the work. Students were being required to work independently - the receive details of a task and need to be able to approach it independently. Therefore the activities needed to be, at this stage of the project, tightly structured so that the students would be in no doubt of what was expected of them. This did lead to the development of rather formally presented tasks, and I for one would hope that in a longer study of a full-blown roll-out the aim would be to develop less formal approaches. However, in the first instance it seemed important that the students got used to the idea that work would be presented and that they would complete it. I did try to create activities that, while formal in presentation, would enable some freedom in the way they were completed - this is obviously vital when presenting creative tasks. My Needs It is very important to me from a dissertation point of view, that I try to get an opportunity to explore more channels of communication that simply e-mail. Therefore I needed to develop a scheme of work that would, potentially at least, lead in this direction. The Scheme Taking into account the above considerations I developed the following basic scheme Scheme of work - Only Connect - 5 weeks Aim: To develop confidence and trust in working on line; to be able to discuss given topics in synchronous communication systems. Objectives:
For the most part - post work done publicly
with students' names removed - invite reflection and comment. Also as virtual
equivalent of wall display. |
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Motivation + | |
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This is a very big deal and it's where the Only Connect project parts
company from most existing work on on-line learning. The point is that we have
a student population that is not self-selecting, they have not asked to be on
this project (well, in this case they had some choice, but in a full roll-out
it would be a bigger issue), and, almost by definition, de-schooled students
may well be de-motivated too. This presents a whole new range
of questions that could be addressed in further research and must be
addressed by any organisation setting up such a scheme. Our experience as
tutors has certainly been frustrating and the ideas set out in the scheme above
were very much 'on the hoof' and, although they seemed to work up to a point,
there's no real indication that those ideas would be enough to sustain
engagement with the work set over a longer period. I'm going to explore some
ideas on this page for tackling this problem, and it's an area that will be
developed much further in my dissertation.
Rules of engagementI've already pointed out above that it seems to be helpful to set up a structure that leads to some fundamental expectation on the part of the students. In a virtual world that offers only carrots and no sticks as far as I have been able to see, we need to work very hard at engaging the students with the activities we set. One possibility is to spend some serious time on the idea of community. There is already evidence that the students in the project have created an informal support network - the virtual equivalent of leaning over the desk and asking the student next to you what you are supposed to be doing. My own feeling is that this should be encouraged and developed. Not only does it figure large in the whole social development side of things, but we can perhaps develop a feeling that there is a 'group' doing the work, even when it is actually individual - loyalty and a feeling of responsibility to the group may increase a feeling of engagement with the task. It's perhaps worth thinking about some of the things we do in the classroom that help motivate students. One of these is about audience. In most classrooms we make some attempt (and here I'm speaking fundamentally as a primary school teacher) to circulate student's work - usually in the form of a display. I have made a small intervention in the project along these lines by circulating some of the students work amongst them. Flying on instinct alone I decided not to circulate the work as it was sent to me, or with any of my comments or marks on it, but to combine answers, un-named, and distribute them. See an example. I will be adding a question to the final interviews to see how this was received. Another possible way of increasing engagement that we use in class is to discuss the work either before or after we do it. We started experimenting with this early on and it became clear that you can't simply 'have a chat'. This is dealt with elsewhere (or will be), but the idea of setting up regular chats with the group (or as many as will attend) seems to have some mileage - after one I received the following e-mail: Hi MarshalThis may not be huge evidence but it seems to lean towards the positive. There will be questions about this aspect in the final interviews too. MORE TO COME |