Representing what you know to increase students’ understanding
In this course, we have discussed the importance of pedagogical content knowledge to your teaching practice. When teachers consider content and pedagogy, they think deeply about their own knowledge and about how to help augment their students’ understanding.
This assignment offers you the opportunity to delve into one teachable topic and make links to your teacher knowledge by carefully considering how you will represent what you know to increase your students’ understanding.
Due: Anytime between Monday, January 30-Wednesday, February 8, 2017
Instructions:
- Choose a topic that you have taught (and are likely to teach again) but that your students struggled to understand. Begin your assignment with a brief description of what students struggled with and how you are hoping your revised approach/plan will address these struggles of understanding.
- Plan a learning experience (“lesson plan”) in which you help students learn this concept (the one that, in the past, proved difficult/challenging to students).
- Highlight how might you represent the key idea within that topic through the use of an image or metaphor or other representation to help grow your students’ understanding
- Annotate your lesson plan for me: tell me why you have planned things the way you have…what is the thinking behind the plan? How are you incorporating ideas about pedagogical content knowledge in the revised plan?
- You needn’t develop the full lesson plan, but could focus on the introduction and assessment or any other part that has been especially problematic and that you would like to work on.
- In your assignment, you should:
- outline the key ideas you want to communicate and describe how your chosen representation would help enhance students’ understanding
- as relevant, make links to the new curriculum
- draw on class discussions and lectures in class (including class slides)
- meaningfully reference at least two readings from the course syllabus; that is, make sure you explicitly link your ideas on knowledge to the published literature.
Please contact me with questions or if you would like to suggest a modification to this assignment. I want this to be useful to you (and others), and am open to alternatives. If you want me to look at a draft of your work, please send one via email by February 3, 2017.
Instructions for submitting the assignment:
This assignment can be done in English or French. I encourage you to do it in French.
Submit your lesson plan directly via the course site (view screencast below for detailed instructions on how to do this). Choose a length that is useful to you as you think of using this in the future.
For this assignment, it may be best to upload a document into your post, especially if you are using images, tables, comment bubbles etc (in which case, a PDF might work well). If you are uploading a file, please name it [Your last name]_Representing_2017. doc Alternatively, you can type your assignment right into the post.
Remember to toggle the Category “Representing Knowledge” otherwise your assignment will get lost among the numerous posts on the site and I will think you have not submitted it.
View this screen cast for instructions on how to upload your lesson plan into a post.
As with other assignments, you can choose to make the visibility of this assignment public or private (private means only you and me can see it).
Things to consider:
1) If you are willing to let others use and/or modify your work, indicate this somewhere on your lesson plan. The best way to do this is through the use of a Creative Commons license. See the Resources section for a link to a good YouTube video that explains Creative Commons licenses.
2) If you are feeling challenged by how to use the WordPress technology, please contact UBC Blog Support (https://blogs.ubc.ca/support/) or drop-in to a Scarfe Digital Sandbox Session. You can also come to my office and I can show you how to do this or we can arrange to do it before/after class.