One to One to One to Many. Tutoring as opossed to class teaching.

I do some one-to-one tutoring, and I'm never sure how successful I am at it, so this was an interesting lesson.  If only I had read Ryan and Zimmerelli before!

They identify a lot of the issues I was having, wanting to make a perfect piece of writing, but not wanting to lead the student, or write it for them, I sometimes felt that I was making the student more confused.  

For example, a student studying GCSE english had to write an essay on the Tempest.  Before she started we talked through the question and what the student thought she was going to write and I helped her form a structure, asking her identify her arguments and pick out quotes she thought would work with that.  I then asked her to do a draft of her essay for the following week so we could look at it.  I think as a tutor I talk too much, this pupil in particular is a 'smile and nod'er and, wanting to help and earn my wage, I fill the gaps too much, get too excited by an essay (which I think I forget that I'm NOT WRITING) and lead her to conclusions she might not make.  This is backed up by the bits of work she produced for me the following week where she had misused quotes, and confused the threads of her arguments.  I noticed that the phrasiology we had been using had cropped up, but that she had not understood it, or used it in the correct context.  I felt awful, in my egerness for a good essay I had been planting ideas which were not hers and left the essay, and the student, confused.


Subsequently I have focused not on content, but on form and structure.  Using the hamburger model which I had already taught her, I guided her through the construction of the paragraphs, but left her to fill in the body of the text in her own words.


The Bedford Guide for Writing Tutors was an incredably useful read, as it helped me identify my faults, and accept them as being common problems, as well as giving me ways of working which left both me and the student getting more out of the sessions.

CVs - a necessary evil? Thoughts on LinkedIn - the future of career networking.

So.... a lesson about CVs.... this felt a little like well mapped ground, as they were covered in the core module last year, and I felt even then that the teaching was unsuprisingly aimed at students with little employment history which was a little irrelevent to the 'mature' students among us.  Yet another example of the pitfalls of structuring a lesson to the masses, rather than differentiating to the individual needs of the students.  Though I do understand why it needs to be done, and that the older students are in a minority.

It was useful to ask some questions, and to review my CV, which is always a laborious job.  I noted that I should be including some details like GCSE subjects depending on their relevence, and that I could update the format of my personal interest section, turning a block of prose into a more digestable list of points.

One ot the most interesting things to come up in our discussion was the relevence of the now slightly archaic CV, when so much of our lives are documented online.  linkedIn, a site which I had only vaguely heard about turns out to be the up and coming proffesional networking site, and it was argued that a good linkedIn profile can double as, and in some cases superceed the CV.

I have now made a LinkedIn profile... accesable here if anyone is interested

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=219904021&trk=tab_pro

........Though I still have a lot to add to it. 

So far it seems like an utterly good idea, though as I have a variety of interests and plural career possabilities, I'm not sure if I will be able to adapt it entirely to my needs.

My main problem with LinkedIn is that it's online
And public.

I know.  I'm living in the dark ages.

Even this Blog, which I know is a useful reflective exercise, petrifies me because it feels like a public platform, a soapbox if you will that I am encouraged to use to shout about my feelings and experiences to the world.  It's not like that.  I know this.  But it still makes me panic.

I wonder whether I am alone in this; as a writer, I am incredably protective of my drafts.  I hate to show them to people until I am moderately happy with them, and those are people I know and trust.  The idea of sharing my personal opinions with the whole of the internet is, frankly, mindboggling. It's been hard. To write this without fear of consiquence.  I use facebook, but I am as privite as I can be, I make few posts, comunicate via privite messages, I am always acutely aware of an audience.  It's a version, I suppose, of Alvin Toffler's future shock, technology advancing faster than I can comprehend, horizons broadening.  And yet, it's the way thay things are going.  It will be commonplace (if it isn't already) for employers to evaluate an applicant's internet profiles.  And the whole writing business works on interpersonal relationships.  Social networking is the future.  I've just got to give in to it.  LinkedIn, here I come!

This Blog is an important feat in my personal developmment, making me challenge my personal fears and get something out there - and proving that the internet is vast, and that not many people really read it!

To Observe, to be Observed. Does the act of observation change what you observe?

In yesterday's Blog post I meant to talk about observating and it's value in relation to Experiential Learning, but I got a little sidetracked.

Observation is obviously important to the way we critique and improve our teaching practice, fitting into the Experiential Learning cycle somewhere between Reflection and Theory (Abstract Conceptualisation).  It is near impossible to observe oneself without bias and having feedback from a third party can help identify practice that can be improved.  Good observation will also include discussion about HOW to change practice, making it a positive and improving experience.



The act of watching others teach can also be rewarding giving new ideas on what works, and what doesn't, to improve and inform our own practice. 

However, in particle physics.... there is such a thing as the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems.  It is also noted in psychology as the Observer-expectancy effect, where people change their behavior when aware of being watched but also how the researcher's cognitive bias causes them to unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment.

I've been witness to lesson observations, and OFSTED inspections in my role as a TA, and I know that an observed lesson is quite often considerably different to an unobserved one.  Not only does the teacher often change their lesson plan, but the students are also affected, which begs the question; Are lesson observations ever acurate?

In this article by the Guardian's 'secret teacher', he bucks the trend by not adapting his lesson to the demands of observation and is penalised for it. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/teacher-blog/2013/feb/02/observations-outstanding-lessons-secret-teacher?INTCMP=SRCH

By switching the seating plan of the class a few days before in order to better the learning of the class, he is observed while the class is still unsettled, and it shows in the observation.  If he had left them where they were until after the obsevation he would have perhaps been marked better, but the students learning on a larger scale would have suffered. 

And so here are the two main issues....

One..... Observation is isolated and microcosmic.  It is done in one class, on one day, and does not neccisarily represent the teaching as a whole.

Two.....With the rise of 'performance related pay' there is an incentive for teachers to engineer the results of observation, making it less about the improvement of general practice, and more like cramming for a test.

So... in general a useful, unavoidable but utterly corruptable part of education.

A question of Experiential Learning

"Experience in itself does not guarantee learning. In order to learn from experience,we must reflect on our experiences; try to relate them to theory; and then plan how we might do better next time."

 

So says Mister Petty in his book, Teaching Today illustating this with Kolb's cycle.  This really resonated with me, it is undeniably important, and I think we've all experienced the act of doing this.  I have been responsible in the past for the devising of lesson plans and enacting them, reflecting and modifying delevery and content, disscussing with other practitioners, gleaning new ideas and approaches, implementing them and starting the cycle again.  However, I had never before seen this cycle as theory, only as good practice.

 

I think that seeing this as a concrete structure and actively understanding and implementing it as theory, rather than implicit practice is important, but not only for educators, also for students.  So many of these theories are aimed at educators, not only for the improvement of their own practice, but also to embed in lesson structure to maximise the education value of what they are trying to teach.  What is explict for educators is implicit for students.  I'm not sure that this is best practice.  Should we not educate students in the understanding of their own learning? Learning to learn, and Teaching to be taught? 

 

So often in class the dominant question of the students is WHY? This is actively encouraged in relation to learning material, but discouraged in relation to the teaching practice.  "why are we doing this?" or more often "What is the point?" I think it would be advantageous for students, certainly by University level, possibly earlier, to understand the mechanics of their learning and the lessons they are engaged with. 

 

As I have learnt these theories I have reflected on my university course and seen in some instances where they have been applied, giving me those golden moments of understanding...."Oh, that was what I was supposed to be getting out of it!".... Unfortunately, this has often come too late, we see then the gulf we identified in the academic literacies model, between the student's and teacher's expectations.  The current vogue of using Learning Objectives, applied in primary and secondary education (though not very often in undergraduate study I have found - this module, of course, being an exception), is one step closer to bridging this devide, however it still does not tell the student how they will achieve the objectives stated.  There is an undercurrent of deminished expectation of learners, that they will not understand or appreciate this knowledge, but must be coerced or tricked with the skills of a teacher-magician into asimilating knowledge.

 

As a tutor I have found that students are often unaware of the way in which they learn.  As the education system weans them off into self-directed learning, around A-levels, I think that understanding themselves as learners is highly informative and relates directly to their achievement, through good note taking, efficient revision and effective personal study.

 

I would argue that certain theories such as: Learning Style - Kinesthetic/Auditory/Visual and Experiential Learning, should be actively taught to students, turning their implicitly understood learning practices into explicit ones that they can access and use to their own advantage.