The power of simple …

October 31, 2008

My previous life was working in the IT industry – software development in particular.  One of the challenges of building good software is about managing complexity.  The colleagues I always had the most respect for were those who could convey complex technical concepts in a simple intelligible way to a non-technical listener.  The most non-technical were normally their managers (often myself included) or clients and prospects who understood their business but were not prepared to get their heads around post-backs, or service oriented architectures! 

So what has this got to do with teaching? Today is the end of my first week on my PGDE placement; I’ve been ’blooded’ by giving my first lessons.   Reflecting on my first lessons I’m continually reminded that the best communicators (teachers included) need to strive to keep thinks simple – while at the same time avoiding patronising or talking down to their audience. Bit like the software industry … well sometimes?

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Posted by Andrew Duff

Literacy beyond the English class

October 13, 2008

TEXT ~ Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by Ladybug1016

The theme of last week or two on the PGDE has focussed around the core skill of Literacy.  Lectures and seminars covered defining the different forms of literacy and ensuring that all subject (beyond just English) need to be aware of the challenges that pupils have in learning and mastering the different literacy ‘genres’ that we take for granted in our ‘subject silos’.  I found this both interesting and thought provoking.

One of the recurring themes was how children learn their early literacy skills through stories (active voice) in primary school then need to make the leap to the more structured conventions (normally passive voice) that are used in subject areas of secondary.  Another point often made was that kid’s main form or reading when young was reading sequentially through story fiction texts, and the challenges they face needing to adapt to skim reading and searching techniques required when reading technical texts.  But … this makes the assumption that most kids do most of their reading from paper. I would suggest that, just like the statistic that  ’children now spend more time on the computer than in front of the telly’,  that many kids will read more in the form of web pages (Bebo, Facebook, Myspace etc) than they do in printed form.  When we read a web page we don’t start at the top and read to the bottom, we follow hyperlinks, scan for images, etc. It would be interesting to understand what literacy issues (different, easier or harder) are being encountered by the post-Generation-X kids transitioning from primary to secondary as compared to those of the paper age.

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Posted by Andrew Duff

Geography and IT

October 11, 2008

My PGDE Geography class had a presentation this wednesday from the inimitable Ollie Bray on how to ‘invigorate’ our Geography lessons through the use of IT.  (Sorry you can tell my age – I still can’t completely bring myself to call it ICT … yet.)  And a very fine session it was too.

Beyond all the top-tips of using the ‘geek-stuff’ (Generators, advanced Google , blogs, podcasts etc) the main tone was about how we should be teaching using the medium that kids are using in their everyday life.  Kids use the web more than they watch TV, they have their phones with them all the time, they listen to MP3s/podcasts, they build their own websites and mash-ups. As teachers we should use these things  - because to fail to embrace technology makes our lessons boring and makes us look like dinosaurs. All good stuff with which I completely concur, and something I will try to do in practice. (Though perhaps getting kids to text me in class won’t be something I’ll be experimenting in on my first placement!)

But here’s my comment on the hurdles of everyone gaining the IT proficiency that Ollie covered …

  • … first how are teachers out there in real teacher-land to gain these IT skills? In my experience to gain IT proficiency you need confidence, and for many more to get there they need those few initial pieces of knowledge to get them ‘onto a roll’.  Is there the time/support  in schools for teachers to do this?  I haven’t been there enough yet to know – but I suspect not.  So then maybe the problem will solve itself as a new generation of IT-savy teachers join the profession. But to do this the current set of student teachers need to have, or be given more IT knowledge/confidence.
  • … so my second point is – Where are the current set of student teachers getting this IT knowledge from?   Ollie did a great session, but it was only 2 hours out of 18 weeks of study.  Given that a level of IT is not a pre-requisite for entry to the PGDE course – should there not be time in the PGDE dedicated to giving students more IT skill as part of their ‘core skills’ for teaching?

But then maybe this is just life, the same with everything.  At the end of the day we just need to get down and get on with it … but the other big message from the session is to ensure that we all share best practice in the spirit of the way that Ollie so enthusiastically demonstrated.

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Posted by Andrew Duff

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