foolfillment: the blog

I was at a Learning and Teaching session for NQTs this afternoon led by Don Ledingham. What a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon it was. I left feeling challenged, positive, and invigorated. Most of all though I felt completely sure that I am in the right job in the right place at the right time.

I wanted to write something up tonight before I being to forget bits, as I write it up though it is turning into a bit of a long post, so I’m going to give a brief overview of some of the challenging questions we were asked then focus on one part. Don has already written a short post on his thoughts on the session.
What was your most intense learning experience? What made it so?
What was your best lesson? What did you do in it? What are some keywords that sum it up? And what about yesterday, how did those lessons compare? Could they have been similar?

In typical Scottish fashion we found it hard to find examples of a good lesson at first, but they did come eventually. It was great to hear the different stories that people had. Some common themes cropped up: shared intentions; collaboration; interaction; discussion; tangible success for the students - which they define.

I don’t think I heard anyone say their best lesson included times where they went off at tangents. For me one of my best lessons was last year. I had a ten minute slot to fill, like a warm up act for the class teacher. I had been asked to introduce timber to some 1st years - cue the groans. “Why on Earth would we want to know about different types of tree!?” Well, I began by asking about the types of tree they knew. Christmas tree inevitably came up. Good, everyone knows the shape of them so it’s easy to talk about identifying softwoods. But what about hardwoods? Do they have many branches? Can you climb them? No, you can’t easily climb them - not that any of them realised that at first, nor why. I showed them this picture which I took in Romania on a caving expedition.

We were doing some SRT* practice above ground - the only thing we could attach a rope to was a huge tree, but it’s branches are way off the ground. I didn’t explain how we got the rope up there… But after that they did know lots of ways of telling apart hard and soft wood trees, they found a way of linking the trees to the types of timber you get from them. They thought about how that affected the possible things you can use different timber types for. They thought about where different trees grow. Why, for instance did none of them know about climbing hardwoods? Because they don’t see them, yet they are surrounded by hardwood timbers in their homes and in the school, in particular the workshops they work in which were kitted out in beech benches and cupboards. (The likes of which PPP schools can only dream of.)

“What about uses for wood?” I asked.
‘Paper’
‘well done’
‘tables’
‘very good’

Then I asked
‘What about for drinking from? What about making every single thing you own from wood?’ This didn’t really make them happy - “how could you possibly make everything from wood? That’s crazy talk” I showed them some photos I took in the Peruvian Amazon Jungle…

I also showed them a photo taken on the floating islands on Lake Titicaca (teehee) where the islands and almost everything on them are made of reeds that grow on the lake bed.

My 10 minute slot over-ran a bit, because they were so engaged with something that minutes earlier they had no interest in whatsoever. They were full of questions and stories, what did they learn? They thought they learned that you can get Mr Meldrum to go waaay off topic just by asking him about travelling, but they also learned that different types of timber have lots of different uses, they learned about sustainable development, they learned about appreciating different cultures, they also learned a bit about respecting the environment around you and the wildlife within it. If they’d pushed in the right directions I could easily have gone on to talk more about SRT which would have given them a huge opportunity to learn all about cams, pulleys, friction, and a host of other mechanical systems/properties that otherwise wouldn’t have been covered in their 1st year of school.

So, that was one of my best lessons, and I think the best bit of it was that I had the scope to go off on a tangent and follow up on the things that the pupils engaged with. I was able to give them not just knowledge in discrete packets, but to give them a meaning and context to those packets of knowledge. I don’t think I heard much talk of tangents today, are probationers all scared of being unprepared? Do we all over-plan? I know I am and do.

I’ll write up more on this, I found it a hugely enjoyable and worthwhile session. I just wish there’d been more time for discussion/debate at the end.

*Single Rope Technique - a way of gaining or losing height in caves and other hard-to-access areas using a system involving one fixed rope and a guddle of bits of metal and other short ropes.

Tags: best-lesson, don-ledingham, East Lothian, learning, learning-intention, NQT-Training, teaching

This entry was posted at 9:45 pm on the 25th of October, 2007 and is filed under learning, teach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.