Direct Instruction
this week we're looking at pedagogy now pedagogy are the techniques and processes we use for teaching and there are a range of different pedagogies available to you as a teacher and as you develop an experience you'll increasingly use different pedagogies to start with though there'll be two main ones that you'll be focusing on and that will focus on in this course the first is around direct instruction and the second is around project-based learning these aren't pedagogies but they are teaching approaches now there are three areas of pedagogical theory that will be incorporating into these two approaches now the first is behaviorist the second is construction constructivism and the third is cognitivism so these are the three pedagogical theories now there are others now these are the three main ones that relate to the teaching of Technologies so behaviorism relates to student motivation student Behavior and the ways that we can modify their behavior so originally it came from an experiment with Pavlov's dog where Pavlov discovered that if he gave his dog treats they would start salivating and eventually they would start salivating even if they thought they were going to get a treat so he was able to change their behavior through various mechanisms and we can do the same with our students we can change their behaviors through applying various techniques and that is the fundamentals of behaviorism mostly used around classroom management but also around student engagement how we want to engage students with the learning process and make the learning process interesting and fun for them now the next theory is around constructivism this is the idea that we construct knowledge in our memories in our memory formation we go through a process of building upon our existing knowledge so if we're learning something new it's going to be related in some way to our existing knowledge now if that existing knowledge our understanding of a concept is false um that can be problematic so but I'll take you through some examples of that in the tutorial so constructivism is around building knowledge and building understanding and then we have cognitivism this builds upon our understanding of the brain and how the brain works particularly around memory formation and we're going to discuss one particular aspect of cognitivism around cognitive load Theory so I've given you a couple of readings to delve into these theories in some more depth the first looks at behaviorism and cognitivism and constructivism and so read that and we'll discuss that in the tutorial and the next looks at a range of pedagogical approaches more broadly that it narrows it down looking at the ones that are more relevant to educational Technologies and to Technologies education so read through those two papers and we'll discuss those in the tutorials in terms of what you've uncovered about pedagogical Theory now of course we're more looking at how we apply that pedagogical Theory to your teaching as a beginning teacher so there are a range of approaches to do this at one extreme we have direct instruction at The Other Extreme we have what's called Discovery learning where students aren't given any particular guidance and they learn completely on their own and they develop concepts by working it through from from basic principles a difficult approach it is possible but we'll discuss some of the challenges around Discovery learning between that though there is project-based learning and activities so in this course we focus more on activity-based learning and project-based learning so not as Extreme as direct instruction not as Extreme as Discovery learning taking a little bit more of a middle ground that direct instruction or as we apply it in this course more activity-based learning involves a much more teacher-centered approach where you plan out a lesson and you deliver that lesson um it focuses very much on developing Core Concepts and is particularly useful in teaching what we call the lower order thinking skills having students remember Concepts understand Concepts and be able to apply Concepts whereas higher order thinking skills involving analyzing evaluating and creating tend to be better supported by project-based learning and we'll discuss that as we explore the two different approaches but direct instruction is very effective for basic understanding of new ideas and New Concepts and it's an aspect that all teachers have to be able to provide student learning through direct instruction and I've given you a couple little video clips to help you around that and Incorporated also some aspects of behaviorism around motivation that we often use as part of direct instruction in order to engage students with the learning process because unfortunately direct instruction can be a little bit dry sometimes sometimes it's it's done without a strong context and we have to work hard to engage and motivate students with the learning process now I've also provided you with a model that is used on their digital Technologies Hub it's not used in other places an awful lot but it is fairly indicative of a direct instruction model so we start with a learning hook this is Again part of that behaviorist approach behaviorist pedagogy where we entice students and engage students with the learning we express something that's going to pick their interest so it might be a little video clip or a little game or some sort of activity that gets them ready to start learning about A New Concept yeah then then we it's been found useful to present to students how what they're about to learn fits in with the bigger picture of their learning now some students are what we call Global thinkers and it's very beneficial to them if they can see where they're learning fits in to a bigger picture not all students need that but certainly some find it very beneficial then we describe the learning outcomes so explicitly state to the students what they're going to actually be learning um then we have a process of what's called learning input where we present to students some new Concepts or ideas and then they construct that learning so they build an understanding of these new Concepts and this fits in with construction constructivism as a learning theory so they're going to be constructing their understanding normally through doing some sort of activity um might be writing some code or querying a database but they've learned about writing code in the learning input they've learned about databases in the learning input stage and now they are practicing that they're applying it in some way they're constructing their knowledge now it can also be done through a lot of other approaches we're going to be talking about some of those then we have them demonstrate their learning so we've taught them something they've practiced it and then they demonstrate it and then finally they'll reflect upon their learning thinking about what they've learned and consolidating that and again this can be very useful for certain students that having that reflective process helps them consolidate how their learning fits in with the bigger picture what they've been learning about so read about those different steps and how that can be applied so now we're going to talk about cognitive load Theory this is a particular aspect of cognitive pedagogy where we understand how the brain works a little bit so in cognitive load Theory we need to understand that we have long-term memory and we have short term or what's called working memory now our working memory though only has a certain capacity now depending upon the research it's between four and nine elements but we can only hold so many different ideas in our working memory at any one time in our long-term memory we can hold Lots that when we need to use them we bring them into our short-term or working memory we also bring in what we see and what we hear into our working memory and if we bring in too much it can overload the capacity of our working memory and that then makes learning much more difficult so that has a rain we have a range of strategies in order to accommodate cognitive load Theory so I've given you those in the text so you can read about those and I've given you a number of papers that help explain cognitive load theory in more detail so I'd like you to read through those and we'll discuss cognitive load theory in the tutorials in more depth so then I've given you a number of strategies particularly related to teaching of digital Technologies but some of these can be applied in other learning areas as well each learning area has some specific strategies that are useful in that particular subject but some that can also be applied more broadly now the first of these is work examples this is taking students through solving a problem say a coding problem or interrogating a database or developing a user interface by working it through on the Whiteboard or on using slides and showing them the process of doing an activity doing something then we have the use modify create process this is where we get students to use something then they modify it and then they create their own solution so they might use some pre-existing code and see how that code does something then they might modify that code and seeing how changes to the code make it do different things and then we might have them try to create a solution draw problem using that code so it's a cyclical process of export exploring particular elements this strategy is speaking aloud this is where students talk about how they're doing something so if they're trying to solve a problem and write some code to do something then they talk about that doesn't necessarily mean they have to talk about it to someone but the process of articulating and explaining how they're they're doing something helps consolidate their understanding one particular approach used in programming is the rubber ducking technique where it started refusing rubber duck but it could be a teddy bear or any inanimate object and instead of just talking aloud we talk to that object and we try to explain it what we're doing in terms of our coding to that object and the process of explaining helps in our understanding of the concept and in the problem solving that we go through now another technique you might be familiar with is code tracing this is where we often use the debugging tools as part of our integrated development environments our programming environments to work through what's happening line by line as some software executes and we can see what's happening and often we can see what's happening with the variables as they might change and we can then identify whether or not what we expect to see happen does actually happen and if it doesn't then it means there may be an error in our code or things that need to be corrected so code tracing is a very useful tool for students to see the execution of their software and how it actually works and whether or not it's giving the expected result now the next is What's called the prim model this is where we do a prediction so we think about what should happen we then execute We Run The the code and then we investigate whether or not what we expected to happen actually did happen or why it didn't happen we then make modifications and then eventually make our final solution that should hopefully work so again I've given you a number of readings to explore the prim model okay so it's an explicit technique used in teaching students about coding and how we can then incorporate aspects so in particular the investigation stage incorporates another model called The Block model um and it has various aspects of atomizing down to individual lines of code then blocking adjacent bits of code together because sometimes the error doesn't occur on the line that might be identified in the code tracing it might occur in adjacent at elements of code we then look at the rationale of why things are related to one another or not in terms of the variables and how different aspects of code interact with other aspects of code and then we chunk these together in macros and look at how things work in a more holistic way so again read about the prim model and the block coding models of how we can teach coding in a little bit more detail a couple of other techniques pair programming is where we have students work together and there's some formalized ways of doing this we have the pilot and the co-pilot the pilot is the one at the keyboard coding in the instructions but they don't make the decisions the decisions are made by the co-pilot like the Navigator they tell the pilot what to do now the process of explaining an idea that can then be implemented by the pilot and turned into code means that the copilot has to be able to articulate their ideas into coding language that the um pilot can understand and the pilot has to be able to interpret someone else's ideas and enact those into code and those processes are very beneficial in learning coding and then finally we have the Parsons problems this is where we give students lines of code that out of order and the students have to put the code in the correct order in order to get the expected executed result and again a very effective technique for students to learn um how individual lines of code execute and the effect that they have on one another and how we have to put them in the right order for the correct effect to be implemented so a range of strategies and techniques that you'll find useful in teaching particularly coding but many of these can also be applied to other elements such as databasing and even interface design and other aspects of teaching of digital Technologies now the final thing to look at is around classroom management and some of the strategies you can utilize around direct instruction and activity-based learning that can support effective teaching so we're talking about classroom management as we go through the course but there are certain strategies that relate more to direct instruction probably the most important of these is to reframe your understanding of management to rather than it being teacher-centered to being relationship based the relationship you have with your students will determine very much the behavior and the attitude students have to their learning um one aspect that you need to sort of understand around management per se is that any incident of misbehavior or activity that you don't want to see happening will have a range of different causes and you need to understand those causes in order to actually affect a change to student Behavior punitive penalties tend to be the last resort in any management process it's much more important that you understand why students may be acting out or behaving in a way that is not supportive of effective learning now it may be completely unrelated to what's occurring in your classroom their parents may be going through a divorce they may have just had a fight with their best friend these are things that can have an impact upon student behavior in a classroom that won't have any real um effect through some sort of punitive measure so understanding your students understanding where they're coming from and why they might be misbehaving is by far the most effective approach now sometimes that can be difficult when you've got a large group of students and you're inexperienced with behavior management and you may have to resort to punitive measures including removal of a student from a classroom sending them to the office things of that but that's really should be the last resort now it's not to say that you shouldn't utilize it particularly if it is completely disruptive there are mechanisms to support Behavior within a school and there are particular strategies that will be available to you and you should definitely utilize them no one will think less of you in fact they'll think more of you if you actually follow the established behavior management strategies and plans that a school has in place and allowing your classroom to devolve into complete disruption that can also then potentially disrupt other classes nearby without you following the appropriate behavior management strategies that the school has in place that's when you would be seen in a negative light but certainly if you apply the behavior management strategies that certainly shouldn't be a problem that said experienced teachers very rarely have to resort to those um you will over time learn a whole range of strategies that will allow you to have a positive learning environment with your students that said students will test these there's a whole range of different things that you will go through as students engage with you in a relational way and you need to understand that it's building that relationship with your students that is so important around this now of course as a beginning teacher as a substitute teacher which you'll most likely will be in your initial stage of your career and also going out under practicum there'll be times when you don't have time to develop that relationship and that then makes some of the behavior management strategies more important but in general setting clear rules and goals and expectations is an important strategy particularly for direct instruction actively supervising and staying on top of things not allowing things to get out of control being constantly aware of what's happening in your class having the old um eyes in the back of your head and constantly knowing what's occurring and being aware of what's occurring and responding to any disruptive or disengagement immediately and coming down on to it without allowing it to spiral of course what tends to happen with particularly inexperienced teachers is they will just put in place a small measure that will then allow students to test that and then then exceed it and slowly ratchet up the disruptive behavior experienced teachers know to crack down really hard and really quick on things that might seem minor because they know that they how it can actually spiral out of control so coming down hard is not seen as being overbearing it's simply a way of setting expectations and students then understand that if they step out of those expectations then you will immediately respond in a strong firm way about that now again that all has to do with the relationships you set of course you don't want to go straight to extreme punitive measures a student talking to their friend you don't send them to the office for that um there are there is a graduated response in any behavior management process but you need to be careful not to allow that graduated response to allow students to ratchet up um a behavioral problem
2023-03-24 05:02
