Unit two Summary -Week 6 Reflection
As our discussion on context and curriculum draws to a close, I took a moment this week after my forum contributions to review the unit objectives. The class discussions spent a lot of time this week examining external influences on context relevance (hello COVID-19!) and factors that effect curriculum flexibility. In examining how philosophical perspectives effect how teaching occurs the class presented some great ideas on positive promotion of student-educator behaviours and how our implicit messaging influences our abilities to communicate.
As a general theme this unit, I found that where evidence is lacking is not in the use of tools for keeping context relevant curriculum (the flipped classroom and case based learning) but in examining how to teach the teachers these skills. There is lots of evidence evaluating these tools on the effectiveness of student learning, but not so much in how we can emphasize the use of these tools with teachers. The same issues arose when trying to examine philosophies of teacher behaviours, lots of evidence on the effectiveness of certain behaviours that teachers use with students, but little evidence on teaching these skills to the teachers. I think it all comes down to the emphasis that is placed on the scholarship of teaching.
When considering how our pedagogic philosophies influence the concept of context relevance curriculum, and what we as educators believe is important, we should also be considering how we have come to learn. In reflecting on what we know about our own teaching, we can identify opportunities for future research to identify how to "teach the teachers".
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