Wednesday, 8.06pm
Sheffield, U.K.
If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are. – Noam Chomsky
I want to learn to teach – a little like I wanted to learn how to write a few years ago.
It’s for a selfish reason, of course.
There’s no better way to understand something than trying to teach it to someone else.
It’s when you first try and say words that you hope make sense and find that they don’t – when your student looks at you with part blank incomprehension, part pity and part irritation – that you realise you have two choices.
You can stop and never do this again.
Or you can try again and get better.
The pandemic taught us how hard it is to teach our children – and I’m amazed that teachers get through what they do at school.
But, if we’re being honest, they don’t actually get through a great deal.
A lot of the day is spent, I think, taking names, and waiting, and going to and fro.
When I was teaching the kids at home we finished the day’s work they had to do in the first couple of hours, usually before the working day actually began, because we had work to sort out as well.
That was partly because teaching the way we learned didn’t work.
You can’t just give someone a book these days and tell them to spend some time and go figure it out.
There’s a process, an intro activity, a build up, some other stuff, and then eventually the kids sit down and get on with the work.
We didn’t have time for that.
Instead, I discovered flipped teaching.
This is where you make a video of what you want to teach. The kids watch it. And then you give them the work to do.
This is because it takes you half an hour to get them to sit down and listen to you if you try and teach them properly.
Pop a video in front of them and they’ll watch it happily.
As a rule of thumb, a 2-3 minute video can get across what you’ll do in 15-20 minutes trying to teach it live.
If you use the 1-take format, where you hit record, say your stuff, hit stop, and are done – you can create content pretty quickly.
Plus, by recording your teaching up front, you don’t need to put on a performance – it’s already done – you can get on and facilitate learning.
The place where I’ve learned the most about this approach is from Lodge McCammon and the flipped classroom. Unfortunately, the videos that teach the elements of flipped classrooms seem to be slowly disappearing off the Internet, which I suppose is the problem with video resources rather than text.
But, there has also been quite a lot of technological change in the last ten years.
It’s a lot easier to use digital technology to create videos than it was.
But teaching is not about production, although it can be.
Michael Wesch, for example, creates amazing teaching videos that looks like hours of effort went into them.
But it’s not easy to maintain that level of output.
Anyway, so this is what I’m thinking.
Try out an approach to teaching that uses flipped teaching methods with Free software.
And see what I learn.
Cheers,
Karthik Suresh
Handcrafted insight 