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 ’

Session 4 Why we do it- the thinking behind the learning

Our last class was a case study for how we should aim to set up a lesson.

We started with 'The Big Picture' so as students we could understand the reason/purpose of the session. I felt that this was important so as to encourage 'buy in' from the students. I know that if I don't feel something is important or if something is just waffle I wont engage. The rest of the lesson could then consist of bricks that filled in the big picture.

As a class we were broken into groups to brainstorm our experiances of good/bad learning/teaching then came back to report our results to the class. The lecturer then rephrased our answers to suit her lesson plan. Throughout the lesson we didn't spend too long on any one activity and there was a variety of activities to keep us engaged.

The lesson ended by creating a flow chart that summarised all we had learnt and pulled it together

MMLTE - Helen's story

Many issues came out of Helen's story.

Ensuring the correct person is chosen for the role. It seemed that Helen was too inexperienced and underqualified for the role she was given. Also much of her team resented her appointment. This is not condusive to a cohessive team. When Helen tried to gather information and advice her team gave poor or self serving advice.

Ensuring adequate information is handed over/obtained. The orgainsation Helen was working for lacked structure, direction and a strategy. Without this and evidence of performace she was left without information to base desisons on or a goal to work towards. She couldn't reflect on the effectiveness of previous decissions because there was no recording or reporting. This was not an example of a Learning Organisation. Therefore any sucess or failure would be more good luck than good management and no positive change can be actioned. No learning can be assimilated into the organisation's mode of action. Examples of information and evidence is shown above in the activity we did in class (see above)

An organisation will struggle to florish with poor leadership. Whatever the motivation for Helen's appointment- (short shirt and eye candy versus potential for professional development for a promising young employee versus spiteful insult to older staff), she was always going to struggle if her superior wasn't going to give her the support she needed to succeed. How are employees 'hearts and minds' going to be without supportive leadership and a common purpose?

Support Helen would have benefited greatly from a mentor but if the organisation doesn't have systems in place to gather evidance and learn from that information then her success and that of the organisation will still be limited. It may not be so suprising that her predesessor had a nervous breakdown.

80/20 Anatomy

Since my last post I have been thinking and discussing with colleagues how the 80/20 could be incorporated into my anatomy lessons. After my initial skepticism I can see how this can be easily and effectively achieved in so many ways if we were to utilise the interactive learning suite.

Teacher tube and You tube are great resources that would enable a student to break each concept down into small parts and replay it as many times as they need. In a lecture you can feel left behind and can miss things and lack the confidence to ask the concept to be repeated. Whereas with this digital version you can replay until you get it.

I have talked to the people at the LTC and am very impressed with all the interactive learning tools they are able to create that will assist in memorisation and understanding. They are creating some things for our classes now.

I have also found some animations, DVDs and software that comes with the latest versions of the text books that I once laboured over. These are real assets that I wish I could have had.

Also it doesn't take that much searching to find websites that are very useful too.

I can totally see how if we had access to these resources in a lab then I could set out tasks for students to complete and float around adding value and clarifying where needed.

I am excited by the prospect.

Design and Delivery

Here we go. First blog.

I'm new to teaching, this is my first year on the other side of the lecture hall. I've come from a physiotherapy background

I enjoyed Nuddy's class and the interactive nature of it and I can see how appropriate it would be to encourage independent thought, promote discussion and challenge ideas and concepts. Also the 80/20 concept that was discussed sounds great but I struggle to see how to apply it to some of my classes. My coleague Scott's sociology class would suit this model well but with anatomy a lot of content has to be delivered and memorised and dosen't lend itself to discussion and debate.

With a large group of students and a large quanitity of information the 'old school' lecture seems the most efficent way of transfering information for a black and white subject like anatomy. I remember hearing last night that only 4% of lecture information is retained but I remember as a student it was my responsibility to learn the information that was presented. This learning was done independently from the lecture.

The labs/tuts that follow up after a lecture are more condusive to 80/20 with group work and tasks that can be suppervised/facilitated by a lecturer. The classroom we were in last night would be brilliant for this.

One thing I enjoyed with Nuddy's discussion was the theory affecting practise and practise affecting theory (theory <---> practise). I can think of instances in my education as a physio where this was not followed. It will be my challenge as a lecturer to be relevant and remain open minded.

Regarding blogs and teaching: the dificulty I see with this medium is the risk of students being too susinct or waffleing on and on.......................and me having to sift through it. On that note I think I should sign off.