Experience 2:
A student has been disrupting the learning of others in the classroom. The Year 9 student is somewhat bored of what the teacher has set out for work which was how to structure a paragraph for an essay. The teacher only uses the white board to write out the paragraph and expects the students to write what she is writing on the board. Losing interest in the activity he starts to disrupt the students in the classroom, this creates a stop and go lesson for the teacher and students as she is always having to stop the work and reinforce him to stay on task too.
I bring this experience up because this situation could have been dealt with better by making the activity a bit more engaging. Although structuring a paragraph on the whiteboard is good for students, I do believe it could be more engaging with the use of ICT. In the Australian Professional Teaching Standards it states in 3.4 “Demonstrate knowledge of a range of resources, including ICT, that engage students in their learning.” (Australian Professional Teaching Standards, 2017) In this day and age, ICT is everywhere so it would be weird not to use it especially because most students have their own devices and are fantastic with them. So how I would structure this lesson is to make a small presentation, each slide would have the instruction of what it is and what to do plus an example of the topic for the paragraph (something funny like Brooklyn 99 a TV show which most people love) then in their table groups they would write something together so for example: (first slide is on the first step which is Point) POINT – Brooklyn 99 is one of the funniest shows in the world and has many great characters that are hilarious and relatable. Then work through the rest of the steps with them. Already by using something students love and relate too they’ll be interested as soon as you mention the name. Also by getting the students to do this work on their devices it allows them to look up things about the show and characters, allowing them to write more stuff about them for their paragraph. A learning theory that can be applied to here is the information processing theory. “The processing which occurs at each stage is assumed to be learned and the degree of this learning is evaluated with respect to two criteria: accuracy and automaticity.” (LaBerge, 1974) This focuses on encoding and retrieval of what a student has learned. If a student can remember how to structure a paragraph by using Brooklyn 99 then already we have a sense of information processing theory. They use the show as a stimuli to encode the structure of a paragraph in their brain, then in further paragraph writing they retrieve the structure of it to write their own piece of writing.
References:
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. “Australian Professional Standards for Teachers” 2017. https://www.aitsl.edu.au/
Laberge, David. “Cognitive Psychology” Vol: 6, Issue: 2, America: University of Minnesota. April, 1974. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(74)90015-2
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