ED1120 Exam

List and evaluate in order of importance, the qualities you would like to have as a teacher. In your answer, make specific reference to: Personal characteristics; Use of teaching and learning theory; Relationships with students and colleagues; A critical reflective orientation

In order of preference: Passion, Integrated Knowledge, Emotional/Interpersonal understanding and Creativity.

Number one quality: Passion

Fire in the belly is good. It keeps the lessons on edge. I do not wish to settle for less. I love science, engineering, electronics, politics, the environment, mathematics. I would be very happy if this could rub off onto my students. For me these subjects are alive and relevant, and according to the constructivists learning occurs when students also find them meaningful. I love talking with people who are also passionate about things - it is a tonic for the mind! Seeing the progression of students as their own interests and passions develop over the years is a great buzz!

Passion for me is about enthusiasm, caring, attention to detail, striving to improve, searching for more, putting things together. Passion is exciting! Passion is about not giving up.

Brunner says that knowledge and memory is constructed because it is significant or meaningful, not for its own sake - this ties passion in nicely with constructivism and cognitive learning theory. The efficient transferal of information from the working memory to long term memory is enhanced by making larger links to prior learning which increases encoding and retrieval. Passion for a subject seems to me to increase the chance of gaining the attention of students, and it should increase the likelihood of critical reflection too. A passionate student will easily move beyond surface retrieval to deep learning.

One of Hattie's five major dimensions of the expert teacher is they can 'attend to the affective attributes' of students. They make the effort to be involved with and care for their students. In particular passion within the expert is expressed as a greater sense of feeling about success and failures. I take this to mean that they are more excited when things work and more concerned when things don't.

Passion should also rub off on the team. When a colleague is excited about their work and their students this encourages me. The possibilities for dialogue between teachers is increased. Vygotsky says that cognition is hugely dependant on social interaction. With passion as a social touchstone both our own learning and that of students will be enhanced.

Number two quality: Integrated Knowledge.

Turning knowing into wisdom. Having the ability to link together lots of dimensions of many disciplines so as to match the needs of students. Being confident with theories of teaching so as to bring a healthy variety and freshness to teaching delivery. Bringing it all together and relating knowledge to deeper principles. Being able to predict the outcomes of different teaching strategies and activities.

Hattie's first dimension of the expert teacher claims that experts do not necessarily know more about their subjects, but they do have many more connections from within and beyond the subject material. The net result of this is that students experience richer and more meaningful teaching, and learning is grounded in the reality of society and culture.

Gardner reminds us with the multiple inteligences that it is not enough to be wise only with words or numbers. We need to have deeper representations of knowledge that include the other inteligences. This will make the tasks that we set students more challenging and real for more of them.

Number three quality: Emotional/Interpersonal understanding

Glasser's choice theory states up front that we can only change our thinking and actions - our feelings remain out of reach. Managing a classroom full of students - each bringing their own emotional baggage to the classroom - is a huge challenge.

Steiner encourages teachers to identify personality types and to work creatively with them. These are the four temperaments (after the Greeks and Galen) Phlegmatic, Sanguine, Choleric and Melancholic. The period of life from 14 to 21 is identified by Steiner to be the time when the 'astral' or emotional part of the person is most strongly developing. Teaching this age requires awaremeness of complex interactions, and the careful direction of activities to facilitate the future developement of the child's ego.

Hattie mentions this awareness of emotion under several of the dimensions of the expert teacher. The expert teacher is able to scan classroom behaviour and recoginse patterns emerging. The expert teacher is able to anticipate classroom disturbances and give appropriate feedback. The expert teacher attends to 'Affective Attributes'.

The Multiple Inteligence model includes the interpersonal and emotional as a seperate and unique inteligences in their own right. So the teacher should not only be able to challenge and relate to students with these intelligences, but also develop these inteligences within themselves.


Number four quality: Creativity

Getting attention, Being inspiring, Stimulating thought and reflection, Modelling best practice (practicing what we preach). Like passion, observing creativity in colleagues and students is uplifting. Creativity or 'Synthesis' is the pinacle of the cognitive part of Bloom's taxonomy and the 'gold standard' for quality of knowledge. According to Bloom the ultimate cognitive aim of good teaching is for students to move way beyond the basic levels of remembering, understanding and applying concepts into analysing, evaluating and creating.

In terms of cognitive learning theory teaching creatively should help at several levels. Firstly the creative activities should get the students attention better, thus getting ideas into short term memory faster. Secondly thinking and working creatively should assist with stronger encoding as links will be made to a wider range of previous memories and more will be retrieved. Because challenging and creative tasks are more interesting the learner will concentrate on them more and 'turn them over in their minds' more - curiosity is a powerful driver!

Why have I put creativity fourth? Not because it is less important, but rathar that I feel that the qualities of passion, knowledge and emotional awareness need to be in place before creativity can flourish.

Number five: Assorted miscelaneous qualities...

Organised, efficient, Networker, Entrepenuer, problem solver, cook, bottle washer, coach, mechanic, slave driver, arbitrer, interpreter, counsellor, listener

Now if only there was a pill that could turn me into a combination of Jesus, Einstein, Carl Rogers and Edward De Bono...

In the use of Board of Studies syllabuses, explain the use of the following documents at school level: Scope and Sequence, Teaching Programme, Assessment Program. Evaluate the part that each of these documents plays in determining what is taught?

'Scope and Sequence' refers to what is to be taught, and when it is to be taught (order) respectively

From the dept of Education in Tasmania: (I could not find any overviews at BOS NSW)

Scope and sequence is vital in whole school planning and in the planning of learning sequences. Scope includes decisions about what is significant and manageable. Sequence includes decisions about what is necessary for sequential development of both skills and concepts.

'Teaching Programme': A document that shows how a KLA can be divided into topics and subtopics, and how each subtopic addresses the sylabus outcomes.

The teaching programe takes the scope and breaks it down into lessons that fit the desired sequence. Typically it has tables or matrices which enable the connection of lessons and learning outcomes to be understood at a glance. Ideally it is a document that makes the resources and work put into a lesson available for future lessons with other teachers and others schools. In this case it would save a lot of 're-inventing the wheel' - but there is also the ever present risk of teaching programmes becoming dogma, and being used slavishly and boringly. Each new outing for a course should involve a transformation of the teaching programme to suit the needs and situation of the new body of students.

The teaching program should also include an Assessment program to show what will be assessed, how it will be assessed and when.

'Assessment Program' Is a document that outlines the assessment tasks, dates, sylabus outcomes, weightings and components for a subject or unit of work. See example here
Hopefully the assessment provides some real evidence that learning has taken place.

Evaluation:
What is the reason for the sylabus and its associated documents?

A positive angle is that they provides form to the wide range of knowledge that is supposed to be imparted to students. By setting a broad but clear minimum standard of what students should learn in each KLA this means that no student should miss out on any important aspects of a subject. The various BOS sylabi set out in a general way what should be taught, but leave the specific content to the school and teacher to fill in. This allows teaching to be tailored for different communities of learners even though they may have varying core beliefs about the best forms of delivery. Additional or extended content is possible within this framework.

A negative angle is that they are part of a 'regulatory' mindset - that all outcomes will be achieved if they are only described, enforced and assessed enough: It is my belief that this type of thinking is a delusion. All the regulation in the world will not make dry, dusty and contextless information transfer to students. This is a top down approach typified by conservative political sentiments about bringing back the 3 Rs. It just won't work - it is the difference between rote learning and deep learning. Without creativity, flexibility, and relevance education is just noise that passes 'in one ear and out the other'.

Having said that, education is a big business, and it needs to be accountable. There are many stakeholders in the process including government departments, political groups, employers, parents and the students themselves.

So within a school level the use of these documents can enhance learning outcomes by giving form to subjects, reassuring stakeholders that important stuff will not be missed, and hopefully not tie down and exhaust good teachers with red tape.

What part do these documents play in determining what is taught?

According to Hattie's research the Physical School, Principle and by implication the Sylabus plays only a very small part in learning outcomes for students. I read this to mean that accross all the range of schools tested there was little difference between schools which closely followed the sylabus and those which did not (more research required here?). After the effect of the students themselves, it is the quality of the teacher that makes the most difference.

Do the sylabus documents help or hinder the expert teacher?

Hattie identifies that Expert teachers are 'better decision makers' (by which he means they are good at improvising and choosing the most effective methods on the run) and cites a study that showed that none of the expert teachers used lesson plans, but that they could easily describe the scope and sequence of their lessons. So instead of rigidly following a teaching programme these teachers were confident and skilled enough to flexibly taylor their teaching to meet the specific needs of the students.

The transition from good to expert teacher seems to involve a jump from the methodical to the artistic. The methodical approach will benefit from the discipline of the sylabus, teaching programme and assessment program. The expert approach transcends the methodical/formulaic and takes teaching to a higher level. The expert is the master chef, the maestro, the iconoclast, the artist who builds bridges while the methodical ones are plodding away around the obsticles.

As a beginning teacher I am still at the methodical stage, and the lofty heights of the expert teacher seem quite out of reach!


For me the discipline of writing a Teaching Programme and Assessment program based on the BOS sylabus is helpful. It is a relief to not have to re-invent the whole scope, and it gives good pointers to ensuring that nothing is left out. I have not yet found myself thinking my teaching is being constrained or narrowed by it. There is room to add additional content, and make connections accross disciplines. I can see how a well written programme is a resource to be used again and again, and a library of these would be a great asset to any school.

In summary: The influence of the Syllabus/Teaching Programe on what is actually taught depends on whether the teacher is a beginner, experienced or expert. Less skilled teachers will follow the BOS scope and sequence more closely and they will rely on making more detailed teaching/assessment programmes as part of their lesson preparation and delivery. Expert teachers transcend this methodical use of the syllabus, they discard the lesson plan, and they taylor each lesson to the intellectual, social and emotional situations of their students. Students of these expert teachers still cover the scope required by BOS, but are more likely to have a deeper knowledge, and better learning outcomes.

How do the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky complement each other to provide the underpinning for the Constructivist Theory of Education?

The core constructivist idea is that knowledge and ways of thinking are generated internally by each individual to give meaning to their world within their social context.

The immediate implication of this is that knowledge is not absolute truth that imposes itself onto the mind from outside, but rather that each individual has synthesised their own knowledge. All knowledge is therefore relative and falable (not always true).

The constructivist theory of education seems to be that desireable learning is accomplished when students encounter meaningful, interesting, playful and challenging situations that are appropriate for their age (stage), and are supported and guided by knowledgeable mentors (teachers, parents, peers), then they will be more likely to construct their own new knowledge building on the previous knowledge they have.

Piaget and Vygotsky complement each other because Piaget concentrates on the individual requirements for constructing knowledge, whereas Vygotsky stresses the necesity of social interaction for constructing knowledge.

Piaget argues that people move through distinct stages of cognitive development, and that this movement requires the overcoming of internal cognitive conflict by adaptation: assimilation and accommodation strategies.

By contrast Vygotsky insists that the internal world is constructed from interactions with other people:

"Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals."
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Piaget's emphasis for the teacher is to set tasks appropriate to the stage of cognitive development of the learner.

Vygotsky's emphasis is to encourage social interaction, and provide support ('scaffolding') around tasks in the form of knowledgeable adults or peers so the learner can build meaning onto the knowledge they already possess.


It is easy to imagine learning situations where to ignore one or the other of these approaches would lead to a failure to learn. For example: teaching algebra to a Piagetian 'pre-operational' child will never work despite having all of the social connections in the world. Conversely teaching algebra to a 'formal operational' child can still fail if there is no social 'scaffolding' to assist the learner to move beyond their existing knowledge.

Together they work well - stage appropriate tasks supported within a social network. This accounts for the structure within individual developing brains, and cognitive development that is dependent on our interactions with others.

Bruner and cognitive learning theory add weight to this by stating that for learning to be successful it has to have meaning/interest to the learner. Without meaning the attention of the learner is not engaged, and the amount of encoding/retrieval to and from long term memory will be significantly less. From the Vygotskian perspective we understand that meaning is often found by observing the response of others - ie it is dependent on social interactions.

So I understand that Piaget and Vygotsky are complementary, and their ideas underpin the constructivist educational enterprise. They and their followers advocate education that is full of fun, rich tasks in rich social settings, with the aim of facilitating deep learning and sponsoring independent, creative thinkers. Just remembering things is not enough, we need to be confident and able to go to the next level and analyze, evaluate and create.