• Teacher-centered VS student-centered
• didacticism or lecturing VS active or collaborative methods

(Barr & Tagg, 1995: From teaching to learning: A new paradigm for undergraduate education)

Task one, read an example teaching statement, and identify teaching and learning assumptions.

Theory of teaching, how one should teach, role of the teacher.

• Socratic method - provoke through questions

Theory of being, reality.

For example in critical/post-modern theory, ontology is very explicit. For others, it's hidden. Social reality is understood as a static thing, human interpretation is not part of the discussion.

Theories of knowledge. Methods of uncovering/building knowledge, truth.

Relationship between what can be known and how it is known, affects learning and research.

Often a theory of teaching becomes disconnected from a theory of learning, becomes reduced to a list of methods or tricks.

Developed in a certain historical and philosophical context. These rarely sit rigidly apart from each other, most theorists and teachers overlap.

Certain disciplines tend to gravitate towards certain paradigms, based on on certain ontologies and epistemologies, as well as disciplinary traditions.

There are things happening at the university that are on the fringe of these, but these three represent the continual claims about best-practices in undergraduate education.

Began in the military, focus: observable behaviour, rather than internal processes. Came into vogue around WWI, some of the studies they did are now considered unethical.

Coming into vogue again, because of standardization.

Learning: manifested in change of behaviour.

• Environments shape behaviour. What is to be learnt is determined by elements in the environment.
• That teacher has mastery of the content to the extent that they can produce mastery through the organization of learning. “Authoritarian”.

• Classical conditioning: Pavlov's dog. Train the dog to produce a certain response to a stimulus. Change behaviour by connecting behaviour to a certain kind of stimulus.
• Operant conditioning: Giving positive or negative reinforcement to produce a certain behavioural change.

• Was popular, not just in sciences, but in language acquisition.
• Lab work - there are certain ways to do things that are right.
• Instructional design - how we plan and execute lessons.
• Very popular in work-place training and technology-training.

• intellectual: competence & ability to respond to stimuli
• cognitive: capacity to learn, think & remember
• verbal: retention, memorization, etc
• motor
• attitudes

• Get students' attention, make sure they are receptive to oncoming instruction
• Inform students about the objective, how they will learn, how it will help them in the future
• Prime the pump, stimulating the retrieval of prior learning
• Present new information in such a way that students are helped to organize patterns, internalizing the information
• Organizing sense/logic to the content
• Demonstration what you do with the content/how things work
• Asking learners to demonstrate something themselves
• Reinforcement/feedback
• Assessment
• Retention

(slide: Elements of lesson design)

• looks like: development of internal cognitive capacity
• task for teacher: design optimal structures for the delivery of content

Scaffolding Gestalt-psychology

Ability to maintain stable perceptions in a noisy world. Also post-WWI phenomena, developed in Germany.

How people organize their cognitive process, rather than the components of it.

Rather than manipulating cognitive processes to produce a certain outcome.

Created by a committee, 1940s-50s.

Goals:

• create more holistic approach to education
• standardize, linking to goals and tested methods, unify assessment
• focus on
  • cognitive processes
  • affective domains, emotional responses
  • psychomotor-elements of learning

What an individual can do on their own

• through imitation
• improvisation

and what they can do with assistance.

Should constantly be moving through stages, with teacher there to facilitate the process, push the student into a higher level of processing.

Assistance provided by more capable others - teacher, or parents, peers, experts, etc. (or collective)

Internalization, automatization, fossilization… de-automatization: recursiveness through prior stages

graph from Tharp & Gallimore: Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context.

Helping students climb through increasingly difficult tasks. Curriculum in your department is scaffolding. Teaching of research methods is carefully scaffolded.

Curriculum design models take scaffolding as their basic assumption.

When teaching a course, find out where that course sits in the level of scaffolding, often articulated in terms of learning objectives or competency goals.

Teach anything that is increasingly complex.

• present new cognitive strategy
• regulate difficulty during guided practice
• provide varying contexts for student practice
• provide feedback
• increase student responsibility
• provide independent practice

Rosenshine & Mesiter: The use of scaffolds for teaching higher-level cognitive strategies.

Devote time to it, taking a part concepts/skills that students have to learn, and how to put it back together.

• construction of meaning from experience
• facilitation of meaning-making

Draws from

• continental philosophy
• sociology of knowledge
• hermeneutics and study of religious texts
• postmodernism
• feminism

Convergence of many theories around a central claim: Knowledge is an interpretation in the human mind, it's made socially.

Diverges quite radically from behaviourism and cognitivism.

Major impact in 1960s and 1970s, response to political movements.

Getting people to “just talk” - but doesn't necessarily mean that people are building knowledge, etc.

• concrete experience: doing/having an experience
• reflective observation: reviewing/reflecting on the experience
• abstract conceptualization: concluding/learning from the experience
• active experimentation: planning/trying out what you have learned

Pragmatic

• small groups
• build knowledge
• problem-focused

People develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.

Progressive humanism