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.