Humanities / technology: concrete preparation and dissonance

04.02.13, Wk 3/3, was intended to be a group feedback session on the Gr 12 lesson. Unfortunately, no one was able to observe the lesson and a willing volunteer to film it wasn’t found. The teacher who had planned to teach the lesson was absent from today’s cell meeting. The rest of us talked around our general expectations of the cell this term/year and discussed what we would find most helpful to focus on. Instinctively, we agreed that anything that would help to improve student learning and, by association, teachers’ teaching would be welcome.

We also reviewed the notion that the process of moving from concrete preparation in our teaching to creating a dissonance for the students was a way of encouraging students to discuss and develop their thinking and understanding around a topic, enabling them to see an issue from more than one angle.

By posing a problem and requiring students to engage with it in smaller groups misconceptions could be rectified by the group member together and solutions could be found, even if all members were unable to agree. We also touched on the purpose of questioning in our lessons: are they to reinforce student understanding, to find out what students are thinking or to create a social construct by which a small group interact and develop their thinking and understanding in the ‘safety’ of a smaller group? All will be applicable at different times.