Re: Digital support for teaching as a design science

Diana Laurillard, April 20, 2012

Yes these are all good points, though I'm not so sure about these two:
"- They are typically "A" students in the command-and-control model.
- They are likely to teach how they were taught."
I suspect that teaching being a low status profession means that it does not get the A students, necessarily - they all seem to go into finance these days. As a student I used to run the full gamut of grades, following my interests and being completely 'cue-deaf' (a useful term from the 70s) to what I would be assessed on. That made me fascinated, as a teacher and researcher, to hear about how my students were thinking about what they were learning. In my first book I related how I began by teaching the way I was taught (filling the blackboard with maths equations) and rapidly discovered how useless that was, and much more use it was to listen to how the students talked about how they were trying to solve a problem. I suspect a lot of teachers are like that - they do enjoy the process of engaging with their students and figuring out ways of helping them. If they rely on the tried and tested methods, that's lack of confidence, and the oppression of the quality inspector who has a checklist of what it takes to be a good teacher.

But you list a powerful set of factors that work against innovation. That's partly why I think we have to focus on teachers, and what they need if they are to act as innovators. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]