Episode 5: Differentiation

More confidence is good, right? Learners require confidence to try out ideas, engage in group work and enjoy their learning. It follows that educators should be looking to boost learner confidence at every opportunity. But could this approach also be creating problems? What about dealing with over-confident learners? And what if our all-encompassing efforts to boost group confidence are less inclusive than we imagine, and are actually increasing the gap between our most and least confident learners? All this and more in this week's episode.

A fresh teaching contract or a new term is on the way, and it's time to plan. Or time to procrastinate - because planning an entire unit of teaching can be too daunting to even contemplate, and a sense of impending doom develops as day after day goes by without any of this precious "planning" getting done. We've all been there, and in this episode we discuss why that is, and what we can do about it. By re-imagining planning as a fundamentally creative rather than an administrative process, we can get back to why we started teaching in the first place and free ourselves to create exciting learning instead of just stoically trying to fill lesson time. 

Teachers should be guides and mentors. But too often we act more like gatekeepers, consciously or unconsciously deriving control and power by granting or denying access to information in our lessons. A narrow focus on teacher talk as the principle conduit for all types of info inevitably favours confident learners, devalues the currency of teacher-learner dialogue and wears out teachers' vocal cords. Developing a deeper understanding of the channels available for disseminating information to our learners  can help - check out this episode for some interesting ideas and practical tips.

Are the best lessons loud and frenetic, or quiet and focused? Some of us worry that our teaching is too chaotic; others that it is too dull. Our attempts to inject energy and motivation can backfire – and nothing is as deflating as watching a task you imagined being fun and interactive collapse into a boring slog for your learners. This episode discusses different approaches to managing energy levels in your lessons to maximise the potential for interaction, challenge and learning.

Do you ever feel like the teaching bit of your life is overtaking the rest of it? Like your week is dominated by the rigid reality of your teaching commitments? Well that's OK if you JUST teach - but what if you're also trying to balance your teaching gig with professional and personal projects? With so many balls in the air at any one time, you need the different aspects of your career not only to work together, but to actually support each other. For teachers working alone up front, this means leveraging the educational skills you have developed so that they work for you beyond your lessons. Check out this episode for some thoughts, tips and encouragement. 

You ask your learners a question ... and they just stare at you blankly. Awkward silence descends. It's rough. As teachers we WANT to engage our learners in dialogue, but it often seems easier said than done. The solution lies in understanding the challenges inherent to using dialogue in the learning process, and developing questioning strategies which maximise the potential of this technique.

At a concert, the best sound is in the middle. Find yourself stuck at the edge and you won't have a great night. It's the same with teaching: we're all guilty of 'teaching to the middle' and neglecting the needs of those learners at either end of the ability spectrum. In this episode we discuss ideas and methods to help you make learning accessible to everyone. 

Only by interacting with our learners can we engage, challenge and support them. But learning space interaction is often restricted by forces of habit, personality or culture. In episode 4 we discuss how you can ensure interaction among your learners is as inclusive as possible.  

They may sound like two more examples of awful educational jargon, but understanding and differentiating between learning objectives and learning outcomes can have a game-changing effect on your teaching - and help you get your planning done quickly.  

It may be one of the driest, most uninspiring topics in education, but getting assessment figured out is the key to planning effective learning. In this episode we dig into all things summative, formative and meta-cognitive.