Effective Teaching

In this episode, Dan interviews Kelly Pfeiffer from Dubbo Distance Education to get advice on remote learning given the current climate around the globe with schools being closed, or needing to close in response to COVID-19.Remote Learning with Kelly Pfeiffer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityWatch the interview belowhttps://youtu.be/STdXa1pHTu0Show NotesHave high expectationsGive a lot of graceKnow life may be crazy at homeThink about the number of devices at home and how many students are thereand so much more.

In this episode, Dan interviews Kelly Pfeiffer from Dubbo Distance Education to get advice on remote learning given the current climate around the globe with schools being closed, or needing to close in response to COVID-19.Remote Learning with Kelly Pfeiffer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityWatch the interview belowhttps://youtu.be/y7Skd3gXtigShow NotesBe organised and ensure you focus on learning firstUse your current LMSG-Suite for education is fantasticFlipGrid and Padlet are also good to useMake time for postageset up a system to manage the work and resources out and in

In this episode, Dan interviews Kelly Pfeiffer from Dubbo Distance Education to get advice on remote learning given the current climate around the globe with schools being closed, or needing to close in response to COVID-19.Remote Learning with Kelly Pfeiffer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityWatch the interview belowhttps://youtu.be/fLL7Y6qVfOAShow NotesSet up a test classroomTeam teach Be organised before handWork smarter not harder - see what already existsParent communication is key, especially for the little ones (active supervisors)

In this Episode, Dan explains the difference between knowledge and understanding. He also provides 5 ways to turn knowledge into understanding to help create lifelong learners. Five Ways to Turn Knowledge into Understanding is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityShow notesHi and welcome to the Effective Teaching podcast from TeachersPD. I’m Dan Jackson and today I am going to compare teaching for understanding with teaching for knowledge and explain why understanding is so important when we are training our students to become lifelong learners.Firstly, let’s differentiate between knowledge and understanding. I think as teachers we all know that there is a difference between the two, but we often don’t think about it in terms of how it affects or should affect what we do in our lessons.Knowledge is basically the content. It is what the teacher presents, or what the student could read or watch in a video. Knowledge is essentially the students ability to replicate what the teacher has taught them. It is a regurgitation of ideas and can include applying this knowledge in the same context in which it was taught. For example, if I teach my class how to add 3 and 3 to get 6 the student can then do this sum. Or, if I teach my students how the biceps is the agonist in a bicep curl and the triceps is the antagonist, they can then repeat this back to me.This is different to understanding. Understanding is when the person can take their knowledge, identify the essentials, the concepts or the processes and transfer these into other settings or contexts. If we revisit our examples then…If we are teaching addition, the student can not only add 3 and 3 to get 6, they can also add 2 and 4 to get 6 or 9 and 9 to get 18. If they have a better understanding they can even add 23 and 54 to get 76 or add 1,230, 345 and 10 to get 1,585. If we revisit the agonist antagonist muscle relationship, a student who has understanding can then tell me why the pectoralis major, and anterior deltoids are the agonists during a push up and pair them with the posterior deltoids, rhomboids, latissimus dorsi, trapezius and teres major and minor which all relax and, therefore, function as the antagonist muscles for the same contraction. Understanding is not just the same application, but a different application. When I use this definition I can also speak of skills as being a form of knowledge. If I teach you how to build by building a birdhouse and you then build a birdhouse to show your skills, you are simply replicating what you were taught. However, if you demonstrate your skills by building a cubby house, or cabinet, you have understanding because you are transferring the skill into a new context or to a new problem or project.So, if we think of knowledge as replication of what is taught and understanding as transfering what is taught by applying it to a new context it becomes obvious which one is the desired result when trying to create lifelong learners… Understanding in case you weren’t sure.Now if understanding is our goal, there are a few ways we can help our students to get there:DON”T USE EXAMS as the main form of assessment! Exams may have a place in education and in schools, but they lend themselves towards assessment of knowledge over understanding. This is not to say that they cannot assess understanding, there are just much better ways of doing this. Often exams are limited in the types of questions they can ask and students sitting them can regurgitate what they have learnt without the need to apply it to a new context. This is a broad statement about exams, which can differ and can assess understanding, but often they do not. Where exams or tests can be useful is in identifying that students have the knowledge and are thus ready to begin to try and understand. That is, the students are ready to apply the knowledge to new contexts ..

In this episode I am going to provide you 5 characteristics of great feedback. The reason I am doing this is twofold. Firstly, because feedback is vital in learning and can be used to help students begin to provide their own feedback and helps to establish them as lifelong learners. And Secondly, because all too often I see teachers getting it wrong. They spend so much time telling students what they did wrong and not nearly enough laying out what the student should be doing to get better next time.No Score Our first characteristic of effective feedback is to ensure you are not providing a score. It has been known now for a long time that if you provide a score on anything that is given back to the student they will look at the score and then the feedback is either completely discarded or seen through the lense of that score. So for example, if Jane was given 40%, if she then reads her feedback it will be read from the position of “I suck at this”. However, if Amy received 90% she may read it from the perspective of “I am already fantastic at this”. Both students therefore do not take in the feedback at all.Given we want our students to:Read the feedback with the intention of improving, no matter where they are atRespond to this feedback by changing what they are doingIt makes sense that we should leave the mark or score off the feedback. This will at least help increase the percentage of students who read the feedback, and hopefully from the right mindset.Give time to improve with the feedback If we want our students to act on any of the feedback, we really should be looking to provide this time in class. This is our second characteristic - give time along with the feedback for students to actually improve. I love asking teachers “What is the best use of class time?” Often we come up with very similar answers, because we all know that it involves something where we are available to actually help our students with the higher-order thinking or at least when we are available to help them develop and learn in their zone of proximal development - that area just beyond what they are currently capable of, but is not so far that it is seen as impossible. This zone normally requires some form of help from the teacher. This could be in the form of feedback, but it can also be in the form or scaffolds, teaching structures, providing guiding questions or something similar.For this reason, I really want to encourage you to provide your students some time in class to read their feedback and then action the feedback. Now, if the feedback is on an assessment that has already been submitted and graded then maybe provide them with something that is similar where they can practice the improvements that you want them to show. Redoing and old assessment task will not often be seen as valuable to a student. But if they are applying the feedback to a new task, they can come around and become much more motivated and active in the learning. So I encourage you to provide both support and a form of action. Provide the minimum support needed for students to improveNow our third and fourth characteristics have already been mentioned, but I will quickly go over them. So the fourth characteristic is to provide the minimum support needed for the student to improve. This is where you might provide a scaffold for them, give them a link to some content if them that they need to revise or even pair them up for an activity where they are working together on another project but applying the feedback. The important bit here is that you are not providing everything they need to improve nor are you doing it for them. You are providing the coaching that they need (and I do often liken my t..

In this episode, Dan explains what cognitive load is and how it can be leveraged to increase the student learning in your lessons.  Cognitive Load is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Join the Facebook CommunityWhat is Cognitive Load?Cognitive load is the theory that your working memory has a limited capacity. This limit varies according to you level of expertise in the subject being examined with an expert able to handle up to eight items and a novice only able to manage four. Your working memory is also limited in time. You can generally only handle these separate items for around fifteen seconds before your memory does a refresh of the items. There are three different types of load when it comes to learning. The Intrinsic load, the germane load and the extraneous load. The intrinsic load is the load that comes with the content itself. Some learning is harder than others because it is more complex or is new content. The germane load is the load that comes with what you need to do with the items. This is the work of learning. For example, if you were asked to describe something this has a fairly low load compared to providing a critical analysis of it. The extraneous load is all about the way the items are presented. If the presentation is cluttered then the load increases but if the presentation is clean and precise it helps to reduce the load.As a teacher you want to reduce the extraneous load as much as possible, the intrinsic load cannot be changed and we should be looking to progress the germane load as the learner becomes more familiar with the items.Teaching Strategies that can help reduce cognitive loadBe selective when you present new information or skills. Keep the key points and ideas, remove anything that is not needed, and spend less time on tangents. Clean up your presentations and teaching and learning area to help reduce the extraneous load.Make sure your students have everything they need to complete a task. If they need something from a previous lesson or are trying to bring multiple aspects of a puzzle together, provide them with a chart or brief summary that they can glance at when they need to. This will help reduce their need to remember items when doing higher order thinking.Chunk the items into related clusters. Our brain does this to store the information, so if it is presented in this way it makes the storing much easier as well as the recalling. Along with this is to ensure you present foundation knowledge and skills and build upon this, rather than simply providing the information in the order of the syllabus or some other format that has not been well thought through.Draw attention to key pieces of information as I have in this section by making the strategies bold. If something is key, foundational or built upon at a later date, make sure the students know this. You can do this by slowing down, repeating key elements or literally highlighting it.Use mnemonics and acronyms to help students store information. Provide pegs from which further information can be drawn. Another great tool is the use of visual walk throughs. Recall as you enter your house and put key items related to what needs to be remembered throughout your visual house that help you recall the information you need to then expand on what you know.Getting students to work collaboratively in groups also helps reduce the cognitive load. Students benefit from sharing the load of remembering the items and therefore can use more items in their learning. You need to make sure the task has multiple items though to ensure all students are needed to complete the task.You must know what your students know! What you can learn is dictated by what you already know. Students can only learn in their zone of proximal development, the learning that they can link to what they already know to go that step further towards the learning goals.