Week #2: Engagement Activity 1

What is Pedagogy?

What is Good? Can Good ever be Bad?

I’ve come to understand “good” pedagogy as any method that effectively achieves the desired learning outcome.  However, a pedagogical approach may not always work in every situation, with every person, with every content type etc. So sometimes a pedagogical approach can be “good”, and sometimes it can be “bad”. I suppose that means that there are no “good” or “bad” pedagogical approaches, just inappropriately selected ones!!

Is this Good, or Bad?

So now that I think I have an understanding of pedagogy and pedagogical approaches and pedagogical theories and pedagogical ice-cream...wait no not ice-cream, I’m just hungry.

Anyway where was I? Ah, yes, I was trying to say now I’m getting my head around all the pedagogies, I thought I would try my hand at defining “my own” pedagogical approach.  Keeping in mind my entire knowledge of pedagogy and pedagogical approaches is from this course, so I’m bound to be slightly unoriginal!!

I found it easier to start with a class in mind and work my way backwards.  So I created a fictitious Year 9 Science class that is currently focusing on chemistry and the environment.  I want to work towards a class “chemistry experiment” where we test the pH of the soil at various locations around the school.

•       Teach basics of pH, what is it, what is it used for etc. (Teacher focused learning, direct instruction)
•        Introduce students to the tools used to do a pH test (Teacher focused learning, direct instruction)
•        Ask class to use the internet/library/family or friends knowledge to write their own set of “experiment instructions” that cover how to do the experiment, safety etc. (Learner focused, collaborative, problem based)
•        As a class go through a selection of the experiment instructions and work to create a single class set of instructions for use in the experiment (so I don’t have to supervise a million versions of the one experiment!!) (Learner focused, collaborative, problem based)
•         Do the experiment in groups of two. (Learner focused, collaborative, problem based)

Now that I’ve started with an example of an application of a pedagogical approach, I can see what my approach actually is!  I have a variation on the well known “I do, we do, you do” method.  Mine is just in a different order as “I do, you do, we do”.  I believe this approach covers the 9 pedagogical principles introduced in this weeks learning materials.

So can anyone tell me if this is what was meant by “create your own pedagogical approach”? How did you interpret that exercise?

- Isabel -