Teaching inspirations

Teaching inspirations

When Pamela Tarulevicz spoke to us in class there were many aspects of her teaching that I could apply to my teaching.

She developed numerous resources that she recycled so that she could tailor an activity to whatever level her students were at.

She had many variations of the same handout that were progressively more difficult ie. Full info, matching, 1 side empty, different parts empty with partners with answers, models/jigsaws on laminated cards.

My colleague Scott said he used these techniques with his high school students and mentioned he used to put magnets on the back of his models/jigsaws so students could present their group’s work. I can see many opportunities to use this in my subject areas.

I was discussing with Scott that it seems good tertiary teaching appears to be more similar to what we used to do in primary and secondary school and very different from our experiences in university.

Other things that were discussed in class were role play and using emit to complete a circle of learning. I have been using emit more in this role. Also make sure you have lots of beginnings and endings, don’t talk too long and break up sessions with activities- individual, pairs and groups, and get students to feed back and teach, and have a standout example. The standout example Pamela used was when she turned the lights off to demonstrate a concept and she was able to refer back to this for the rest of the paper and the students would remember.

Pamela got us to compose a twitter to concisely summarise what we had learnt - this is a good technique that I can see my class could relate to. It also gives the lecturer feedback as to what level of understanding has been achieved.

Bjorn mentioned that he has been using many techniques we have learnt in class but many students were still not getting it. Techniques used included pairing up brighter students with those who were struggling, presenting the information in different ways, using activities and making it practical and applied. After discussion Pamela said keep up the good work and continue with repetition, repetition, repetition because even the most simple person can spell their name!

Other ideas that I can use in my teaching are using puzzlemaker.com and having one member of a pair act out the clues to solve the puzzle and using the postbox activity we did in class to generate questions for groups to quiz each other. Also Diane showed me an article where at med school they were using Plasticine to build anatomical models and using colouring in to show concepts.

After a recent lecture on levers and biomechanics I have been thinking of ways to make it more practical and applied. I came across a teachertube video using lego to create the 3 different types of levers. This would be a good activity to try next year.

Reflecting on other department’s lessons (2)

The social workers presentation contained a good learning spiral where the lesson linked to an activity on emit and then to her next lesson. This is great for repetition and for creating more beginnings and endings to facilitate learning. This is something that I think I can bring into my lessons. Instead of having discrete lectures having only one beginning and end I can have emit links and reviews of previous lectures before starting a new one. The other thing I liked about the social worker's presentation was the use of a high end solo question at the completion of the lesson to promote deeper thought.

When the accountants were questioned about the use of pair work versus group work they said they chose pair work so that both people were involved in the activity. With larger groups some students can slack off or be lost in the crowd. This is something I should consider when giving out tasks.

Reflecting on other department’s lessons

Being passionate about your content will inspire your students to follow. This is especially true with a subject that could be viewed as dry, difficult and/or boring. The builders were talking about maths but they could easily have been discussing students views about my subject-anatomy.

The builder’s also found their students had preconceived ideas around maths so to combat this they didn’t refer to their content as maths but rather called it ‘construction calculations’. They were also going to adapt their course so that the maths component was very practically oriented so the students saw the purpose and relevance of each step.

Another topic that came up was literacy and numeracy competence. The builders referred students that were struggling to a learning support person and held extra voluntary tutorials. We have started voluntary tutorials too but I think I will look into the learning support services to see how they can assist our students who are still struggling.

The other department’s presentations made use of lots of beginnings and endings,

individual, pair and group work

feedback/forward

practical examples

students presenting/teaching

Listening to the ideas from the other disciplines made me realise they way I learnt anatomy was not the best way to teach it. We were told information and expected to learn it. I can see the more a student has to think, act, discuss, present and engage the better and more affective the learning will be -as these 2 clippings from our previous class show.

Most people learn …
10%	of what they read
20%	of what they hear
30%	of what they see
50%	of what they see and hear
70%	of what they talk over with others
80%	of what they use and do in real life
95%	of what they teach someone else

I hear and I forget

I see and I remember

I do and I understand ’