A teacher has a number of pedagogical approaches at
his hand. The question of choice of approach/es is always debatable. What
should a teacher do? The answer lies in the nature of learners. A teacher
should understand his learners at the first stage and devise learning
strategies accordingly.
Ten pedagogical approaches suggested by LSIS are
Source: LSIS
As it has already been stated that learner should kept at the centre place while selecting a suitable approach. In general it would be better to say that successful learning process can occur by applying a combination of approaches. It cannot be justifiable to say that one approach is better than the other. But it would be right to say that one approach is better than the other in a particular context with particular learners.
I would like to mention the approaches that could be used with Learners pursuing Engineering Mathematics at Diploma level. The learners are diverse in terms of age, previous experience, numeracy and gender mixed.
Differentiation: Tomlinson (2001) states, “Differentiation allows students multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they have learned. A differentiated classroom provides different avenues to acquiring content, to processing or making sense of ideas and to developing products so that each student can learn effectively.” This approach considers that individual learners. My learners need individual attention. Some of them face difficulties in basic calculation and on the other hand some are advanced and need challenging questions.
Co-operative Learning : Johnson& Smith (1998)states that it is essential to improve information acquisition and retention, higher level thinking and interpersonal communication skills. In my workplace the students can be divided into small diverse groups. During the assignment they discuss their difficulties in the group and individual members suggest different solution to the problem and as a team they agree on an appropriate solution and shows collaboration.
Learning Conversations: Learning conversation acts as a scaffold to help learners reflect constructively. My learners not only converse with the teacher but also with peers to review their progress and accordingly decide what to do next. When they face difficulty in understanding the complex integration problems, they use to converse with the teacher.
Similarly the other suitable approaches that can be used are multi- sensory learning in which the students use different senses to grasp knowledge and e-learning in which the information and learning is available to the learners conveniently.
References:
Johnson, D.W., Johnson, R. and Smith, K. (1998) Active Learning: cooperation in the College Classroom. Edina, MN: Interaction Book Company. Retrieved from
Laurillard,
D., Stratford, M., Luckin, R., Plowman, L. and Taylor, J. (2000) Affordances
for learning in a non-linear narrative medium. Proceedings of the American
Educational Research Association Conference Retrieved from
Tomlinson, C. A. (2001) How to differentiate in
mixed-ability classrooms. 2nd ed. Alexandria, VA. Retrieved from
http://tlp.excellencegateway.org.uk/tlp/pedagogy/assets/documents/qs_differentiation.rtf
Good to see your discussion of these three pedagogical approaches. You must reference the secondary sources, not the authors of the primary sources, since you have accessed these.
ReplyDeleteSo the reference is: The Quality Improvement Agency for Lifelong Learning (QIA) (2008). Effective practice in teaching and learning. [Add name of resource here.] [Also name of website if there is one.] Retrieved from.....
When discussing differentiation, you could also include learner preferences, and prior knowledge and perhaps some of the different methods used in engineering to help individualise the learning process, e.g., problem-based or project-based. What else could be done to encourage this? Hint: work-based learning agreements? Projects are also good for co-operative learning, and also problem-solving as you mentioned.
Also think about how conversations could be used to encourage reflective learning and becoming an expert learner - monitoring progress etc.