Pratt article reflections and teacher philosophies

Penny’s Reflections on Daniel Pratts’ paper “Personal Philosophies of Teaching: A False Promise?

Being a silver lining girl the negativity of this article stood out more than the message, it was focused on what people or universities aren’t doing well rather than what they are doing right or how to fix it. Deakin University have had a go at supporting teachers to develop their philosophy and can be found at http://www.deakin.edu.au/itl/pd/teaching-tips/documents/develop-philosophy.pdf , this is a very short exercise but does have lots of good references.

USQ have observably read the article, teaching philosophy with genuine reflection can be found at http://www.usq.edu.au/users/santacru/teaching%20philosophy.htm , and it is was the first in line with a google search on teaching philosophy. The criteria reflection that is involved in designing a personal teaching philosophy is a process that teachers go through as part of their personal learning in becoming a teacher, and often involves looking at the way they were taught. This process often isn’t repeated until prompted.

Learner centred teaching philosophies are not a new theory but as mentioned in Learner centred Education by Donald A Norman and James C Shopher http://ldt.stanford.edu/~ejbailey/02_FALL/ED_229B/DesignTheory/norman.pdf but it is the internet and online learning that has made problem based and learner centred teaching more prominent. Vocational education in my experience has already been learner centre, even as a child the projects that are given to me in primary school were learner centre. Pratt does have a point that it is hard to talk about Learner centre as it does have different meanings. This link http://www.teachervision.fen.com/teaching-methods-and-management/curriculum-planning/4786.html is about learner centred versus curriculum centred teachers. I think that all teaching is learner centred as the goal is to help learners achieve some sort of learning goal? Maybe I have over simplified this!

I agree with his point about the value put on student evaluation, while these are very important and do contain a valuable insight to who the students felt, I think that teachers need to chance of rebuttal as often there is some bias that occur.
What do you think is effective teaching? If the student has a positive educational outcome is this effective? Does this have to be measured against others or against a curriculum? I think he does conclude well and if the article makes one teacher reflect on their teaching philosophy than it has done a great job.

Personal experience for me of online learning has been a constructivism approach, it has often been a self guided experience, rather than a facilitator guided approach. This subject to me is a facilitator guided course, having a weekly outline and weekly tasks suits this subject. Often in online learning it is hard to keep the students engaged, having weekly objectives helps to keep me engaged.

As a teacher have tried to keep the students engaged with lots of quick wins to get them enthusiastic about subject matter. I then introduce longer activities to help them feel proud of their work, a scaffolded approach. In the virtual world project that I have worked on for the past year, we were using a three pronged approach using scaffolding, situated learning and critical reflection.

Social Interaction and Group formation

This has been an interesting week, everyone is very passionate and seems to be engaged. If you miss a day the amount of posts to read is almost over whelming. Not that I can complain I am adding to them too.

I am finding with this subject that I am able to curb my need to respond to every ones posts or have a post in every group. I am being more selective with which ones I add to. I hope this is a sign of maturity not of laziness.

The group formation so far as been exciting I am in the same group as Lesley which is great as she will keep me engaged and push me to work harder. The rest of the group also look good. We are having a name discussion at the moment and it looks like we could end up being the TOOL QUEENS, it brought a funny picture to my mind, but if we pick the tool topic it is very apt.

I have emailed the course facilitator a couple of times but had no response from doing this within the course. I may have to email here at USQ to get a response, I am a bit disappointed with the lack of response and don't want to harass her, but I will persist. Still working my way through the reading and they are interesting if not some long winded.

I tried the Community of Enquiry approach with the CIT Virtual World group on Monday morning and they seemed keen to give it a go. It was wonderful to see them so engaged and excited with the project and we haven't even decided on the outcomes yet.