Requirement: An understanding of teaching, learning and/or assessment processes
Statements here might relate to areas such as teaching experience, learning design, curriculum development, work-based assessment, the creation and execution of a programme of training and so on.
Evidence might include being on the register of the Higher Education Academy, a PGCE award, having completed a SEDA-approved course or undertaken relevant sections of the FERL Practitioners Programme or Certified E-Learning Professional courses. Commentaries from peers on your approach would also provide suitable evidence. Other possibilities include teaching experience, reflective statements that analyse experience in terms of learning theory, pedagogic approaches, sociological theories, or a comparable, recognised perspective. In relation to learning design, a report, specification or reflective statement might be provided that clearly elaborates the principles that informed the design process. In any collection of evidence there should be some consideration of how technology is changing approaches to teaching and learning and/or the roles of learners, teachers and support staff.
Reflection / Description
Evidence
Description
My experience of teaching and learning has been built up over a number of years, both as a teacher and a lifelong learner. After completing my first degree, I embarked on a Postgraduate Certificate in Education programme to teach Physics in a secondary school, which I subsequently did for 20 years. This included 12 years as Head of Physics, which further developed my interest of and involvement in curriculum development for students between the ages of 11 and 18. It is perhaps not surprising then that when computers first began to trickle into schools during the mid to late 80s, they had an influence on my thinking.
The first computers in our school were BBC Micros which were located in a single room and supported the Computing curriculum. They were only available to other staff and students in slots which were not timetabled and as such were largely inaccessible, especially given that the user interface was at the command line and far from intuitive. These were followed by another suite of computers, this time DOS-based PCs to support the new Business Studies curriculum, and once more largely inaccessible for the same reasons. At this time my experience with computers leaned towards improving my own familiarity and moving beyond hand-written or typed resources for students, to ones which could be stored, edited and re-used, rather than incorporating the computers themselves into lessons and schemes of work. That changed when the original BBCs were replaced and therefore released to be distributed amongst the Science labs (which meant I now had permanent, continual access in my classroom) and when the Library was extended to include a suite of Apple Macs, albeit nowhere near sufficient to provide 1:1 access for a class of 30 students. after becoming more familiar with the BBC Micro (for which no training was provided), it was then a matter of devising ways in which it could be become part of our Physics lessons. This meant either the whole class gathering around the small monitor (useful for teacher-led discussions e.g. use of motion sensor & graphing software) or as one station within a circus of experiments. Whilst this was an early example of the technology being brought into the learning environment, it was also now increasingly possible to take a group of students to use a suite of computers in the Library. Since there were too few computers for single-person use, it was necessary to devise appropriate activities for students to undertake paired work at a particular device. Strangely, unlike paired or group work which I often managed within the Physics lab, early attempts at using computers in this way were not so successful; a single student at the keyboard often ‘drove’ the computer whilst their partner was inactive.
As the number of computer suites around school increased, access improved, both for teachers to book for class use and for students to use during non-contact time. At this time however, students were often still very unfamiliar with the technology so whilst I needed to spend some of the learning time introducing how to use the technology (and subsequent time providing remedial support) and whilst students were still very much in the ‘hunt and peck’ phase of keyboard use, lesson pace often suffered rather than improved. At this point I began to develop a flipped resource (although it wasn’t called that at the time) for A level students to undertake supported self-study of a Medical Physics module using a Hypercard stack I had created. This was quite novel in that the technology allowed them freedom to work independently at their own pace (and to some extent when they wanted), whilst I was freed to provide targeted support to individuals as and when they needed it. It was at this point that it became obvious to me that technology offered the potential to change the way students could access their learning.
The next major development was when school acquired its first interactive whiteboard (IWB)/data projector, which it located in an IT suite so that staff could book to use it with the computers. It of course subsequently became apparent that this was a poor choice of location. A career change to become Curriculum Development consultant in a City Learning Centre provided the opportunity and impetus to think far more deeply about how IWBs might be more fully exploited, as I was required to provide the training aspects of a major IWB roll-out across schools in the city. Not only did this require me to rethink the way black/whiteboards were traditionally used, but I now found myself working with somewhat different learner groups in the form of adults (teachers) and in learning situations very different from the regular timetabled slots I had been accustomed to all my career. This meant a rethink of the pedagogies and teaching strategies I had become adept with, especially as the learners with whom I was now working were invariably visitors from other workplaces. One of the strategies we devised was the ‘Triples Programme’ which involved me working in a coaching role with participant teachers during spaced sessions to develop a teaching idea employing technology. With the teacher having decided an area they wished to address, I would them help them develop the necessary skills, consider possible pedagogical approaches, produce appropriate support resources, undertake the activities with their students, then evaluate it afterwards. Although I didn’t articulate it in this way at the time, it’s now clear that with my new adult learners, I had begun to adopt more andragogical principles when devising learning activities and programmes. This addition to the way I think about the learning experiences I develop continued into a further career change back in a school, supporting both teachers and students in their use of learning technologies. So now as I work with colleagues, I think about the pedagogical approaches they use in appropriating technologies in the curricula they develop, andragogical approaches in the resources and support I provide for them and more recently how a heutagogical approach might in fact be more appropriate. This subtly different consideration arose recently as I studied on the HandsOnICT MOOC and designed a learning resource for teachers to use completely independently. Having decided on a need to be addressed, this involved outlining the learning objectives, establishing a persona for whom the resource was to be designed, setting the context, creating a scenario within which it would be located, building a heuristic evaluation to test the design, then summarising the process through a narrative framework. This I feel provides a useful overview of the range of techniques I bring to bear when thinking about how technology can be used to help learners use technology to enhance and extend their learning.
Reflection
I often speculate on the extent to which twenty years of teaching prepared me for ‘teaching’ adults in the form of teachers. There are of course clear differences (age and maturity, prior knowledge and schemas, roles and responsibilities), yet there are also many similarities (fears and concerns when exposed to new learning and new approaches, spectrum of abilities and capabilities). However there is no question that each learner group poses its own challenges and requires thought,care and consideration when preparing appropriate curricula.
Having the opportunity to turn a lens on those challenges and experiences through studying on Masters programmes proved both rewarding and informative, encouraging me as it did to become a more reflective practitioner and to become so in a public space through my blog. A prime example of where the two came together was when we undertook a case study of a particular intervention we implemented within school, whilst reflecting on our own choices1 of the technologies we chose to undertake the case study itself. Similarly when I implemented the EPICT programme, a professional development programme which sought to incorporate several of the features identified in research as being key in effective CPD, undertaking a case study through a module on the Masters programme enabled me to reflect2 in much greater detail on the implementation.
As I look back on the journey I took from the my experience of technology, I can see clear changes in my thinking towards pedagogy. In the early stages it was entirely about how *I* could use technology to support me as a teacher in the tasks I had to perform, then of course how I could best appropriate the technology for use with my students. Often this was influenced by issues of access (whether in school or at home, both for me and the students), reliability and functionality. People often claim it shouldn’t be “about the technology; it’s about the pedagogy” and whilst I would tend to agree, actually of necessity the technology often drives the pedagogy. So if you only have a single PC in a classroom connected to a data projector, then you choose pedagogical approaches to make the most of what you have. If you only have a PC suite with sufficient desktops for one between two, then you devise activities which exploit paired work. When laptops connected through wireless networks became available, it meant you could plan activities where the technology supported the learning within the native environment, be it a Science lab, Drama Studio or gymnasium. Now that handheld devices are becoming commonplace, and more importantly, owned by and in the hands of our learners, we are in a position to develop learning experiences which encourage personalisation and autonomy, anytime, anywhere. The tricky part is of course when you don’t have a sufficiently extensive pedagogical repertoire3 to accommodate the perhaps limited affordances which you can draw upon. Thinking about how my approaches have developed over the years4 and the areas I still need to work on puts me in a much stronger position when endeavouring to help and advise others.
Formal qualifications gained as a developing educator include
(Scanned images of the certificates can be found below)
Blog posts referred to above:
Less formally, but perhaps more reflectively, my blogs at Practically in the pICTure and 366Web2.0 explore how we use and develop resources to support our learners. Many in the former are ideas which I have implemented directly as a result of supporting colleagues or in preparation for my own lessons.