AWDteaching

In the subjects I teach, Sociology and Psychology, students have to almost learn a new language.  There are abstract concepts, strange methodological terms and new words to describe old ideas. Making sure students can understand and use this vocabulary is crucial if they want to be effective social scientists.  With this in mind, I now take vocabulary seriously, and am more than happy to give a large portion of the lesson over to ensuring students understand key terminology - in this blog I’m going to try and present a process for doing this. 1. Check Prior Knowledge Sometimes, a word that you think that is new to the students may not be. They have learnt it in other subjects, or have some background knowledge of it. For example, as a psychology teacher I have to teach Adorno’s F Scale, which requires an understanding of the word fascism - students may have some understanding of this word from their history lessons.  To check this prior knowledge, I usually simply ask a f...

Comparison is natural human instinct  I once, semi-jokingly berated my students for failing to come to conclusions and judgements in their essays. My frustration was, as I explained to them, to do with the undeniable fact that they are  always  making judgements – whether this be about the latest Netflix series, who they are friends with this week, or what lessons they like and don’t like. The point I was getting at, which is the main focus of this blog, is the fact that humans have an inbuild propensity for making judgements, and perhaps more importantly, making comparisons.  There is a reason why wine tasting events are so popular. You give people two glasses of wine, and they can compare and tell you which one they prefer, without too much cognition.  The question is, how can this natural comparative instinct be put to use in the classroom? Students need to understand what they are comparing “Answer B is the better paragraph” “Why do you think that?” “It’s lo...

When I look back at my professional life, I am in no doubt that my development as a teacher is a slow ongoing process, with no real watershed moments, just a constant stream of new experiences and ideas that continuously help me improve as a teacher.   However, there is one idea that changed everything for me, an idea I scarcely came across during my training and ECT years - Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning Theory, or to be more precise Sarah Cottingham’s ‘In Action’ interpretation of it. The short book reframed my thinking about teaching, and whilst I could write a very long blog about this, I want to narrow it down to the one key idea that changed the way I planned, taught and reflected as a teacher.    We cannot learn anything without it connecting to something we already know   This point terrifies me in a way. When I look back to my early teaching, I 100% saw each lesson as an isolated event, completely different to the previous lesson and the subsequent one. Cotti...

Arguably the most important claim in the whole of the cognitive science discourse is the claim that memory is the residue of thought. Put simply, students will remember what they thought about during a lesson. Willingham gives the hilarious yet instructive example of a teacher, who was teaching the Underground Railroad, who got his students to bake biscuits as this was a staple food for enslaved people.  Clearly this would not get students to think about the necessary material, and they would instead remember the process of preparing and cooking the food, rather than the historical knowledge that they needed to know. This principle led me to think about planning in a completely different way. I now take a ‘thinking view’ of my lesson, and try focus on this viewpoint throughout the lesson. My focus, whether I am questioning, explaining, or making sure students are demonstrating good behaviors for learning, is on what the students are thinking about.  The implications of having ...