“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
So said Socrates, anyway, and he was a pretty bright chap by all accounts.
Reflective writing is increasingly being used as a form of evidence in many qualifications and as part of professional development programmes. It was central to the assessment of my PCHE qualification, and it’s the main method of assessment for my other half’s CILIP chartership process.
By why? What’s so important about it?
Looking at the date of my last post, it’s been almost exactly two months since I last posted. I suppose that’s not surprising, since those two months contained an awful lot of stuff happening elsewhere in my life, such as moving house and Christmas.
However, it does mean that I’ve so far missed out on the traditional ritual of looking back on one’s year to date and using it as blog-fodder. So here we are then. Time to have a look back and see what I’ve learned from the experience so far.
I should make it clear before getting into this that it’s my fiancee who watches Strictly, not me. My fiancee. I just happened to catch it out of the corner of my eye while I was doing something manly, like DIY. Anyway…
If you live in the UK, you’ll probably not have managed to avoid at least hearing about Strictly Come Dancing, a reality TV show in which professional dancers teach celebrities to dance (in the US and Australia it’s called Dancing with the Stars).
In recent years the big Saturday show has been supported by a half-hour gossip show every weekday evening, going by the name Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two.
In case you were starting to wonder where I was going with this, the first little bit of yesterday’s It Takes Two saw the professionals talking about the approach they take to teaching their celebs, and it makes for quite interesting watching. If you’re in the UK, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer, around 1:10.
What’s interesting is that all of the celebrities think that their pro is a great teacher, but from a dispassionate point of view there are differences. I think Brian sums it up nicely when he says “a really good teacher is a teacher who learns to adapt their teaching style to different types of student.” It’s noticeable that the professionals who have consistently done well across series have been the ones who adapted well to their celebrities.
And as Erin points out: “‘World Champions’ doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a good teacher.”
Just a little something to think about.
Margin Notes by Peter Lindberg
More recently, though, I’ve been reading things with, well, more words in them.
Room 800: Police Evidence Room by Sam Teigen
But as I’ve come to the end of my current stint of volunteering at the National Trust (on which more in a later post), I’ve been feeling that I want something a bit more than just the shouting into the void that I do here. More »
Someone recently asked me a very interesting question: what two techniques would you use to enable academic staff to make the most of new technology for teaching?
A number of thoughts ran through my mind at this point:
But I like the idea of narrowing it down to just the two most important; a bit like some weird and geeky version of Desert Island Discs. Plus, to keep my analytical side happy, there’s plenty of scope for categorising loads of specific ideas under two broad techniques.
I have several reasons for writing this post. Chief among them is curiosity: I like pulling the universe to bits and poking it to see what happens, and I’m genuinely interested in finding out how readers of this blog actually keep up to date with the blogosphere. Second, I’ve spent a lot of time in academia, where evidence is a key part of life; I’m aware that a lot of what I say on here is just my opinion so it’ll be nice to make a change to that (self-selecting samples aside). Third, it’s useful from a promotion perspective to know how people are getting here: Feedburner and Google Analytics stats only tell part of the story. Finally, the PollDaddy plugin for Wordpress has been around for a while now and I really want to try it out.
So, without further ado, here’s my first reader poll:
Down House (Darwin's House) by yours truly
Today’s blog post was inspired by a trip to Down House in Kent, where Charles Darwin spent the latter years of his life with his wife and family, and where he wrote, amongst many other works, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Posterous welcome email
Some while ago, now, I asked for answers to the question Why use technology in teaching? I was preparing to run an afternoon workshop for some fellow students on a HE teaching course and wanted to present them with some convincing reasons to consider technology in their teaching, so I turned to twitter and the blogosphere. At the time I promised a follow-up post summarising the discussion, so here it is.
Hi, I'm Jez. Welcome to my blog, where I talk about learning, teaching and educational technology.
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