This week we've been learning about and discussing professional skills development (module 5) with Scott and assessment and feedback (module 3) with Mike.
In development models we've looked at the journey from Unconscious Incompetence (not knowing what you don't know), to Conscious Incompetence (aware that you need to increase skills), then Conscious Competence (applying new skills with clumsy awareness) through to Unconscious Competence (skills embedded so you use them without having to think about it).
In Berliner's model, a teacher goes from Novice (Stage 1: Novice. At this stage teachers are labelling and learning the different elements that make up classroom tasks. Performance in the classroom is rational, relatively inflexible and requires purposeful concentration. Students on school experience and into their first year of teaching are likely to be at this stage.) to Expert (Stage 5: Expert. This stage is characterised by an intuitive grasp of situations and non-analytic, non-deliberate sense of appropriate behaviour. Teaching performance is fluid and seemingly effortless as teachers no longer choose the focus of their attention, but operate on automatic pilot and have in place standardised, automated routines to handle instructions and management. Expert teachers are likely to have difficulty in unpacking or describing their cognitions.) via Advanced Beginner, Competent and Proficient. (As an aside, this journey is expected to take up to five years - long enough to take me almost to official retirement age; is it worth it, I'm wondering?)
In assessment and feedback we've discussed the necessity for methods which promote equality and diversity in the former; and ensuring that the latter is constructive and, ideally, given in the postive/development/postive "feedback sandwich", or "medal and mission" model.
The two areas came together for me with a resounding clash in Friday's last session. We'd been doing an exercise in pairs, rewriting some viciously presented feedback on a theoretical student's assignment in a more appropriate way, and presenting our results on the visualiser. Hugh and Beth's joint rewrite had produced a piece of feedback which was still fairly negative and hadn't followed the model of finishing off with some positive, motivating remarks. Several of us remarked on this - perhaps I was the most critical, I'm not sure - but there was some general discussion.
While this continued, I was unconsciously re-reading their three paragraphs up on the wall screen and clocking the fact that their last two paras repeated each other, that the third para was better constructed so that if they cut out the second, replaced it with the third and wrote a brief, positive final para, they would have a well-written piece of sandwich-style feedback.
It wasn't until Mike picked me up on my use of the phrase "incredibly repetitive" that I realised I'd actually pointed this out aloud and unfiltered. I mean, I was, of course, aware that I'd been speaking, but had fallen so automatically back into my normal Unconscious Competence of writing/re-writing/editing my own work or that of other writers who actively want that sort of explicit and robust exposition, that it had completely over-ridden my Conscious Competence (or Incompetence) of giving positive and polite feedback to trainee teacher peers.
It took me literally several seconds to connect with what Mike was implying in relation to my using the word "incredibly" - that it was harsh and inappropriate. Beth told me to stop being so competitive. But I wasn't intending to be either critical or competitive; I was simply and automatically doing the job I've been doing all my life (in various forms), which is to turn clumsy or badly constructed text into meaningful and flowing prose which effectively delivers the message it is intended to.
I don't like the fact that I've come across as both rude to two people I like and respect, and arrogant in a group of people where my age and life experience already gives me certain advantages. As well as that, though, it's scary that my Novice teacher status can so easily be undermined by my "Expert" writer/editor status - what if it happened in a real classroom situation, and I didn't even notice?
17 October 2009
12 October 2009
Refelctive Journal 2: Micro-teach
Too long between reflections (posts). The micro-teach assignment (an observed/assessed 30-minute lesson to the DiTLLS class with all the preparation, resources, knowledge we've covered in the course so far) has taken up almost all available headspace, woken me up in the night and kept me in a state of permanent anxiety until I actually delivered it a week ago.
Having learned about Initial Assessment - checking learners' ability in advance of teaching them - I thought I'd apply my specialist diagnostics experience (previous life) and distribute a survey to my "learners" (classmates) about what aspects of punctuation and grammar they'd find most useful for writing essays. The result was that two subjects were equally popular, and I was fixated with the need to get them both into my half-hour lesson. They were: uses of the semi-colon; and broadening vocabulary for better writing. For the latter, I had this brilliant idea of demonstrating how to use the Thesaurus tool on Word on the visualiser (great chance to embed functional ICT skills) to enhance a piece of writing, and was very resistant to the suggestion from Asif - who is an experienced ESOL teacher - that I shouldn't be over-ambitiout.
After much stressing, I prepared a detailed lesson plan for my tutorial with Mike, with all this material crammed into half an hour and emailed it to him beforehand. Thank god for good tutors. The college admin and infrastructure may be dodgy, but the standard of teaching is ace. Without making me feel like the complete idiot I was being, he pointed out that I'd never get through it all in 30 minutes, particularly with my grandiose technological plans, and suggested that I choose the simpler subject of semi-colons. What's more he recalled a literary debate on the semi-colon in The Guardian as source material, helped me slash my lesson plan, recast my aims, revise my learning outcomes and generally design a plausible micro-teach. What a relief - the stress decreased by about 50%, though it was still a strangely terrifying prospect.
It took me a couple of days to work up the lesson plan, create the PowerPoint, write the handouts and practice it, as far as was posssible without an audience. I found it far harder than I'd anticipated to find pieces of text punctuated, or punctuatable, with semi-colons, but eventually I got there.
The micro-teach day was a buzz - a bit like a school concert for which everyone had long been rehearsing their solos, and now we were all into high adrenalin performance mode. Each of the other eight sessions was wonderful in its own unique way: Dan gave us a practical lesson on putting up and taking down mic stands. I admired his relaxed, confident style, if not his timing; Nat delivered an exuberant and entertaining lesson in underwear design, for which we all ended up designing a pair of knickers; Sarah relied on simple props and a graphic experiment to illustrate Field Theory; while Hugh, the other psychologist, fed us fascinating - if somewhat free range - information about eating disorders. Asil, whose teaching experience shines out in his calm control of the class and casual use of physical space, inducted us into the Muslim practice of fasting; Kelly produced a simple but brilliantly resourced teach on skin conditions in hairdressing; Jay gave us an ebullient and enthusiastic introduction to the origins and contemporary uses of rhetorical devices; and Beth brought theory and practice perfectly together in a lesson on how to draw faces. I learned from all of them.
So how did the semi-colons go? Well, not too badly, in the end. After a few seconds of initial panic, I felt sufficiently confident and at home with teaching to enjoy my own session. One of the great pleasures of doing this course is finding - after years of delivering presentations, seminars and management training sessions without ever having had any training myself - that there are right and wrong ways ("positives" and "areas for development") of teaching, but they are learnable; that there is a structure of theory and practice which, if you allow it to, will support your strengths and minimise your weaknesses.
I was intensely relieved to find that my lesson plan went to time and that I remembered the flow of the lesson without resorting to notes - not even the print out of the PowerPoint slides, which I've been used to relying on. The first two practical tasks went well, were at an appropriate level and consolidated learning effectively. I think my enthusiasm for punctuation (and writing) came over and I was clear enough in my explanations.
What I realised I lacked, skillswise - especially after watching the videoed version - was an effective questioning technique, with varied ways of assessing understanding and learning, keeping students involved and included. My worst mistake, though, was in designing a final task that was inappropriately difficult for most people, with poor instructions about what they were supposed to do and wrongly assessing which "interest groups" (in terms of content) to assign people to. I was fixated (again) on the need for everyone to finish the lesson by punctuating a proper piece of text relating to their specialist subjects, and ended up giving them complex excerpts from books, the comprehension of which diverted them from the basic task of working out where to use semi-colons. I didn't find any resources of this kind on the net - obviously, in retrospect, because they are inappropriate as learning materials at this level. What I had found were handouts of simpler sentences, and rejected them as too boring. As Laura pointed out, the Literacy curriculum works in the domains of Word, Sentence and Text. I should have stuck with the first two and left the last till a later, putative, lesson.
At some point I will be having a tutorial with Mike where I get his summative assessment, and also that of Pearl, who sat in on a number of the micro-teaches as a second assessor. I know there will be plenty of points for development that come out of there, but in the meantime, from evaluation forms (learner assessment), class discussion (peer assessment) and watching the video myself (self assessment), I'm happy enough that I was able to achieve the standard I did, and that I can see what I need to work on and how.
A final thought: the micro-teach experience has really bonded us together as a group. We had a sessions in the cafeteria where we looked through each other's lesson plans and offered ideas for resources and activities. On the day we were all strongly supportive of each other's lessons as learners, and genuinely impressed by everyone's skills, creativity, subject knowledge and unique teaching abilities. The relief of having got this hurdle over with has also, perhaps, made us rather over-excitable in the subsequent week and perhaps more of a handful to teach. I'm not sure which phase this comes under in the Forming, Norming, Storming, Performing paradigm of teamwork, but we've had lots of shared jokes, raucous moments, exchanges of personal info and the kind of honesty that allows, for instance, Hugh to tell Jay that he hated him at first, but now really likes him (several people said they felt the same and Jay told us he hated us all at first, but now...). We haven't got into socialising together, but some of us have long and somewhat manic conversations on Facebook (last weekend, one after one, we reported on the cringeworthiness of our micro-teach videos and were reassured by the others; this evening we've been chastising each other about bad language in class); and on Sunday afternoon, Nat, Jay and I all took our children to the same showing of the film "UP" - coincidence or telepathic team bonding....?
Having learned about Initial Assessment - checking learners' ability in advance of teaching them - I thought I'd apply my specialist diagnostics experience (previous life) and distribute a survey to my "learners" (classmates) about what aspects of punctuation and grammar they'd find most useful for writing essays. The result was that two subjects were equally popular, and I was fixated with the need to get them both into my half-hour lesson. They were: uses of the semi-colon; and broadening vocabulary for better writing. For the latter, I had this brilliant idea of demonstrating how to use the Thesaurus tool on Word on the visualiser (great chance to embed functional ICT skills) to enhance a piece of writing, and was very resistant to the suggestion from Asif - who is an experienced ESOL teacher - that I shouldn't be over-ambitiout.
After much stressing, I prepared a detailed lesson plan for my tutorial with Mike, with all this material crammed into half an hour and emailed it to him beforehand. Thank god for good tutors. The college admin and infrastructure may be dodgy, but the standard of teaching is ace. Without making me feel like the complete idiot I was being, he pointed out that I'd never get through it all in 30 minutes, particularly with my grandiose technological plans, and suggested that I choose the simpler subject of semi-colons. What's more he recalled a literary debate on the semi-colon in The Guardian as source material, helped me slash my lesson plan, recast my aims, revise my learning outcomes and generally design a plausible micro-teach. What a relief - the stress decreased by about 50%, though it was still a strangely terrifying prospect.
It took me a couple of days to work up the lesson plan, create the PowerPoint, write the handouts and practice it, as far as was posssible without an audience. I found it far harder than I'd anticipated to find pieces of text punctuated, or punctuatable, with semi-colons, but eventually I got there.
The micro-teach day was a buzz - a bit like a school concert for which everyone had long been rehearsing their solos, and now we were all into high adrenalin performance mode. Each of the other eight sessions was wonderful in its own unique way: Dan gave us a practical lesson on putting up and taking down mic stands. I admired his relaxed, confident style, if not his timing; Nat delivered an exuberant and entertaining lesson in underwear design, for which we all ended up designing a pair of knickers; Sarah relied on simple props and a graphic experiment to illustrate Field Theory; while Hugh, the other psychologist, fed us fascinating - if somewhat free range - information about eating disorders. Asil, whose teaching experience shines out in his calm control of the class and casual use of physical space, inducted us into the Muslim practice of fasting; Kelly produced a simple but brilliantly resourced teach on skin conditions in hairdressing; Jay gave us an ebullient and enthusiastic introduction to the origins and contemporary uses of rhetorical devices; and Beth brought theory and practice perfectly together in a lesson on how to draw faces. I learned from all of them.
So how did the semi-colons go? Well, not too badly, in the end. After a few seconds of initial panic, I felt sufficiently confident and at home with teaching to enjoy my own session. One of the great pleasures of doing this course is finding - after years of delivering presentations, seminars and management training sessions without ever having had any training myself - that there are right and wrong ways ("positives" and "areas for development") of teaching, but they are learnable; that there is a structure of theory and practice which, if you allow it to, will support your strengths and minimise your weaknesses.
I was intensely relieved to find that my lesson plan went to time and that I remembered the flow of the lesson without resorting to notes - not even the print out of the PowerPoint slides, which I've been used to relying on. The first two practical tasks went well, were at an appropriate level and consolidated learning effectively. I think my enthusiasm for punctuation (and writing) came over and I was clear enough in my explanations.
What I realised I lacked, skillswise - especially after watching the videoed version - was an effective questioning technique, with varied ways of assessing understanding and learning, keeping students involved and included. My worst mistake, though, was in designing a final task that was inappropriately difficult for most people, with poor instructions about what they were supposed to do and wrongly assessing which "interest groups" (in terms of content) to assign people to. I was fixated (again) on the need for everyone to finish the lesson by punctuating a proper piece of text relating to their specialist subjects, and ended up giving them complex excerpts from books, the comprehension of which diverted them from the basic task of working out where to use semi-colons. I didn't find any resources of this kind on the net - obviously, in retrospect, because they are inappropriate as learning materials at this level. What I had found were handouts of simpler sentences, and rejected them as too boring. As Laura pointed out, the Literacy curriculum works in the domains of Word, Sentence and Text. I should have stuck with the first two and left the last till a later, putative, lesson.
At some point I will be having a tutorial with Mike where I get his summative assessment, and also that of Pearl, who sat in on a number of the micro-teaches as a second assessor. I know there will be plenty of points for development that come out of there, but in the meantime, from evaluation forms (learner assessment), class discussion (peer assessment) and watching the video myself (self assessment), I'm happy enough that I was able to achieve the standard I did, and that I can see what I need to work on and how.
A final thought: the micro-teach experience has really bonded us together as a group. We had a sessions in the cafeteria where we looked through each other's lesson plans and offered ideas for resources and activities. On the day we were all strongly supportive of each other's lessons as learners, and genuinely impressed by everyone's skills, creativity, subject knowledge and unique teaching abilities. The relief of having got this hurdle over with has also, perhaps, made us rather over-excitable in the subsequent week and perhaps more of a handful to teach. I'm not sure which phase this comes under in the Forming, Norming, Storming, Performing paradigm of teamwork, but we've had lots of shared jokes, raucous moments, exchanges of personal info and the kind of honesty that allows, for instance, Hugh to tell Jay that he hated him at first, but now really likes him (several people said they felt the same and Jay told us he hated us all at first, but now...). We haven't got into socialising together, but some of us have long and somewhat manic conversations on Facebook (last weekend, one after one, we reported on the cringeworthiness of our micro-teach videos and were reassured by the others; this evening we've been chastising each other about bad language in class); and on Sunday afternoon, Nat, Jay and I all took our children to the same showing of the film "UP" - coincidence or telepathic team bonding....?
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