Today has been a pretty slow day. Not slow as in the amount of work, slow because of lack of sleep (kids not sleeping, not working all night!), hence the posting last thing of the day.
I have had some pretty good feedback from a number of students already about yesterday's class, so I would like to thank those students for their thoughts and reflections.
In retrospect now I think it was interesting, provocative and a little bit challenging. Clearly curriculum planning is something that you really should get your head around - it does and will clearly drive your practice. But hand in hand with this is that I can not reiterate how important it is to do the reading, pre-reading, post-reading, reading, reading, reading. This helps with how you conceptualise ideas and more importantly often gives you a frame from which to operate. My gut instinct is telling me that about 50% of the class is keeping up with it...others see it as a bit of a chore. Perhaps there is no meaning in the approach....... :-)
I am really interested in how each and every one of you will develop this process, (i) as a result of class and (ii) how it might be influenced by placement. I want you to consider it an invite to speak with me about this interesting topic. Come and see me, get me on the phone, tweet me or skype me to discuss your thoughts. The downside of all of this is that you wont get much of a chance to do this exercise when you become a teacher...you will be lumbered with numerous tasks to get stuff done, so I really implore you to examine this when you can now (relatively now!).
I am hoping that my pedagogy was useful and different. Concept mapping I find is really helpful, but like many skills you need to really work on it. It's useful because it demonstrates what you know and understand, what connects with which concept - importantly it also gives you a chance to have a look at perhaps what you don;t know, which is also good also. It provides you with an opportunity to think about how (the process; the people, the places) of finding out information and to support you. {Remember that when you give support there is a small part of you that suggests you need to be reciprocal in the relationship. Great way to develop a community of like minded practitioners which can include me.... :-); twitter, facebook also}. A good tool to use when you are confronted with something that you know a little bit about, but not a great amount. Give it a try...
The individual activity was partially in response to some FB received from students that group work can often been 'choking' and hard to get through the political processes. My rationale for this was to give you some time to think individually about how you might best tackle this problem...yes collaboration is important and I know that some of you really used this effectively. How is it that I can be a little more accessible to all of you as you collect and develop your thoughts>? ANy ideas, pls comment or tweet....I also consider this as an ongoing project so please dont put this in the bottom of your bag!
I would like to have had a little bit more time to present the VCE stuff. I did not know, nor understand the type of reaction that it received. Maybe lecturing this sort of stuff is not really the answer; podcast, vodcast, skype a teacher some other thoughts anyhow....Perhaps the stuff that you have been learning at university is paying dividends in terms of your thinking. Part of me thinks that if you are able to see the bigger picture then as future leaders (who is going to be the next ACHPER president!) you will be able to go through the process of making significant change both socially, practically and politically.
I am still a bit flat, so really short and sharp today. Enjoy and see you next week.
TB
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