Representing what you know to increase students’ understanding
Due: Anytime between Tuesday, June 16- Tuesday, June 23, 2015
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 teacher knowledge by carefully considering how you will represent what you know to increase your students’ understanding.
This assignment can be done in English or French.
Suggested instructions:
- Choose a topic that you have taught (and are likely to teach again) but that your students struggled to understand. In your text, briefly describe what students struggled with and how you are hoping your revised plan will address these struggles of understanding.
- Imagine yourself teaching that topic in the future. 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?
- Plan a lesson (or part of a lesson) that highlights your approach to teaching this concept which, in the past, has proved difficult/challenging to students.
- Annotate your lesson plan for me: tell me why you have planned things the way you have…what is the thinking behind the 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.
Please draw on class discussions and lectures in class (including class slides) as you annotate your plan. Also, make sure to meaningfully reference at least one peer reviewed journal article from the course syllabus; that is, make sure you explicitly link your ideas on knowledge to the published literature (you can reference more than 1 article, as long as at least 1 is from the EDST403 syllabus).
I encourage you to use images, as appropriate.
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.
Instructions for submitting the assignment:
Submit your lesson plan directly via the course site between June 16-23, 2015 (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. This assignment can be done in French or English.
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_2015. 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.