PG's Ponderings

"2014 is the year the Web turns 25. Today, 19 August, marks the anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, releasing the code of the WWW to the public by making the files available on the net via FTP (refer to the History of the World Wide Web for more details). Last March in Vancouver, Tim Berners-Lee gave a TED Talk: A Magna Carta for the Web , that was just released by the TED conference: These are extracted from his concluding remarks: What sort of web do you want? I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces, as some countries have been suggesting they should do in reaction to recent surveillance. I want a web which is, for example, a really good basis for democracy. I want a web where I can use healthcare with privacy and where there's a lot of health data, clinical data is available to scientists to do research. I want a web where the other 60 percent get on board as fast as possible. I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innova...

We have a number of feedback tools. These questions are also useful: What did you like best about this year’s course? What did you like least about this year’s course? What would you suggest that I change? What surprised you most about the work covered? What don't you understand or need help in? Make a list of some of the new things that you learned or found out during the course. Why do you remember those particular points? What do you want to remember about the course work? When do you think you will use what you learned during the course? How did my teaching help you to understand the course? What would have made the learning environment in our class better for you during the year? Katie Lepi's 7 Effective Templates for Teacher Feedback (Edudemic.com, 17 May 2014) is also a very useful resource.

"...a practitioner (who) does not reflect, ... is inattentive to the limits of his actions." (Schön, 1982, p. 282). Schön argued that teaching is not "a method but an art". He postulated that the "artful teacher" will find a way to solve the problems of his students by looking at himself, stating that a teacher will invent new methods to "develop in himself the ability of discovering them". Schön put forward a novel approach, the idea of "reflection-in-practice" and "reflection-on-practice" in which the researcher becomes a part of the practice, allowing the proceedings of practice to continue, thereby confirming the legitimacy of the practice. This approach is based on the teacher demonstrating a "tacit knowing-in-action" which reflects an intuitive understanding of everyday actions. Schön suggested that the reflective practitioner endeavours to make sense of the issues which he or she encounters through the refle...

This particular technique involves a four-question set that gets students actively responding to the material they are studying. They analyse, reflect, relate, and question via these four prompts: Identify one important concept, research finding, theory, or idea ... that you learned while completing this activity. Why do you believe that this concept, research finding, theory, or idea ... is important? Apply what you have learned from this understanding to the context of the question? What question(s) has the activity raised for you? What are you still wondering about? [You might need to prohibit the answer "nothing".] Key steps to follow: Which details seem significant? Why? What is the significance of this detail? What does it mean? What might it mean? How do the details fit together? What do they have in common? What does this pattern of details mean? What else might this pattern suggest? What other explanation could be given? What details do not seem to fit? What other pa...

This term we will start on the three key focus points for students preparation for the examinations and the ending of the course programmes: Listening – listen to where your students are at in their examination preparation or in the course completion. Questioning – what do your students need, what are they asking for, and what questions are you asking them. Analysing - identifying, clarifying and developing solutions and answers to the questions – fine tuning the learning and the examination preparation. To analyse something is to ask what that something means. It is to ask how something does what it does or why it is as it is. Analysis is the kind of think-ink you'll most often be asked to do in your work life and in school; it is not the rarefied and exclusive province of scholars and intellectuals. It is, in fact, one of the most common of our mental activities. Most people already analyse all the time, but they often don't realize that this is what they're doing...

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In preparing for the examination, it may be useful to get the students to develop their own questions, based on what they know. Begin the revision with Students Developing Questions: Have your class think of questions that could be asked about the exam topics. Create a Taxonomy of Questions: When students begin to label the different kinds of questions, they learn to select different kinds of questions to perform different kinds of thinking. No matter what the level of schooling, some kind of label can work effectively. Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework (this would work with the Flipped Classroom): Put your classroom questioning typology to work with their examination preparation. If students read a question, let them form extension questions for the next day's discussion. Try these six key steps: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student atten...