Posts Tagged ‘subject replaced by topic’

pedagogy across disciplines

This article pleads for a consideration what now is a full-blown reform in Finland (replacing subjects with topics) and seriously considered in the UK, as reported in this IMS blog: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2015/03/24/education-reform-finland/

Broadening Pedagogical Knowledge by Learning from Other Disciplines

By: January 20th, 2016

http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/broadening-our-pedagogical-knowledge-by-learning-from-other-disciplines/

there’s a long-standing and still fairly widely held belief that the teaching needed for a particular kind of content is unique. Unless you know the content, you can’t know how to teach it.

What and how we teach are linked, but there are other connections besides those between method and material, and those connections aren’t all unique to the discipline. All (well, almost all) teachers want students engaged, and student engagement in physics and philosophy doesn’t look all that different. All teachers are concerned with classroom management issues. If students are dealing more with their phones than the material, the content is irrelevant. All teachers have a responsibility to prevent cheating. All teachers aspire to use fair and equitable grading practices. Course design principles transcend disciplines. The features of a good multiple-choice question are not discipline specific. And then there are those student characteristics that challenge teachers in every field: passivity, lack of motivation, low self-esteem, less than adequate study skills, and excessive grade-orientation start the list.