Another issue that came up in our discussion of deep and surface learning was the value of strategic learning – that is, that successful students find out what exactly is demanded of them in terms of assessment: they want to do well and get good marks (leading to marketable qualifications). I came across a good example of this over Christmas when one of my great-nieces, who is in her first year of a degree course, told me that she had been disappointed in the marks she got for her first exam. She asked for an interview with her tutor, who explained in detail that, although her knowledge was excellent, the way she laid out her statistical tables and the language she used was not sufficiently academic to get her a first-class degree. Continue reading
Category Archives: Education
Deep and surface learning
Some friends and I were reading up on work done by Bob Farmer at UCE on deep and surface learning*. One of the things we discussed was Bob’s reference in a recorded lecture to Queen Eleanor’s cousin as an example of a fact. A good student would go beyond the mere regurgitation of a fact (an example of surface learning) to link it to meanings in their pre-existing knowledge. My friend and I (as deep learners) made quite different links to wider meanings. She would have asked what the evidence for this fact was, while I would have wanted to know more about Queen Eleanor’s role in the power struggles of the time.
I discussed this with Bob on the phone this morning, and he said either would be a good example of deep learning.
*To be found inthe writings of Graham Gibbs, for instance
Neuroscience and education
Neuroscience: implications for education and lifelong learning
I read recently this second of four modules in the Royal Society Brainwaves series on neuroscience and society.
It makes a strong case for people in education to be aware of the promise of a scientific approach to education when neuroscience can tell us more about the workings of the brain. It is, however, disappointing in that there are as yet no “biological” tests for such well-known conditions as dyslexia. Practitioners still have to rely on psychological / behavioural tests for diagnosing such disabling condition. Continue reading
U3A
Some friends have attended a meeting in a Birmingham suburb full of retired teachers called with the purpose of setting up a University of the Third Age in the area. It was packed with interested people and a further meeting has been called for this week.
I was talking to one of them about the Observer article that I wrote about in this blog last week – about first class courses free online – and we agreed that some of the U3A group might like to access these courses and study them together.
I look forward to hearing whether anyone has taken this up.
Learning for free
The thing that got Breakthrough to Learning into MMHS in the first place was making the course available free to anyone on the internet. This seemed to me to be a good use of the digital revolution – and it has certainly paid off.
About twenty years ago I attended a conference organized by the Society of Authors. At this event it became clear that, with the international availability of information through the internet, there was no way that copyright could be defended. This is hard luck for authors but wonderful for readers. My life has been transformed by Wikipedia, another free service set up by people who want to share knowledge without profiting from it (though they seem to be hard up at the moment). Continue reading
Matthew Moss High School, Rochdale
I have decided to make my next few blogs the emails I send to friends who are interested in Breakthrough to Learning. They are a record of some of the things I learned on my visit to the above school last week. The school has adopted BtL throughout the school. Continue reading
Language for learning in early childhood
This is the title of a paper by Claire Painter, published in Language, Knowledge and Pedagogy, ed. Christie and Martin, 2007, Continuum.
The author tape-recorded interactions between herself and her two children, one up to the age of thirty months, the other from thirty months to five years. These recordings were transcribed and studied to throw light on how very young children learn language. The work is modeled on Halliday’s recording and analyzing of his own son’s language development*.
Painter is less concerned than Halliday to fit the child-parent utterances into his three-fold model of language (ideational, interpersonal, textual). Her work is more exploratory but she elicits some persuasive categories of the child-parent interactions: Continue reading
Unpacking English Literature
I was lucky enough to spend most of my teaching career sharing the enjoyment of classical literature with pupils and students. Going to a grammar school in the forties had opened “the canon” to me and I felt privileged to continue the tradition by introducing the great works of English literature to the next generation. My last experience of literature teaching was sitting in deckchairs in the garden of a Cambridge college sharing the experience of English poetry with teachers from the Soviet Union, who were brought up in the same “Cultural heritage” tradition. It was so enjoyable that it felt superfluous to be paid for it.
However, I had long felt uncomfortable with the lack of theoretical structure underpinning the teaching of “English”, not least the total separation of English language from English literature. When I discovered Stylistics in the seventies, I seized eagerly on this link between the two. (Stylistics is the linguistic examination of literary texts.) Continue reading
Of apes and men
I’ve been lucky enough to be put in touch with someone embarking on an M.A in Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. She has told me about some of the recent books on her reading list and I look forward to getting up to date with what is happening in some of the research areas of the subject.
I was particularly interested in the work of Michael Tomasello, Co-Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. I hope to get one of his books but meanwhile I have enjoyed a lecture on:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8933367116959974563 Continue reading
Testing
In order to test the efficacy of a piece of teaching/learning, the standard practice in Applied Linguistics is to give a pre-test and post-test of the same kind and level of difficulty, trying to isolate the effectiveness of the teaching by keeping everything else the same.
In the Wigan Language Project we hypothesized that the course would show an improvement in the reading and writing of academic/formal English. So we set pre- and post-tests at the beginning and end of Book 2 (Year 8) and Book 3 (Year 9).
Book 2 taught the language of abstract ideas and Book 3 basic discourse structures, but, since no teacher likely to buy the books would have heard of this, we called Book 2 Reading for Learning, and based the exercises on the processing of academic texts (reading). Book 3 we called Writing for Learning and the exercises were based on the composition of academic texts (writing). Continue reading