Practical Pedagogy

40 New Ways to Teach and Learn

Mike Sharples

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429939013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Practical Pedagogy expands the universe of teaching and learning. It provides an accessible guide to new and emerging innovations in education, with insights into how to become more effective as a teacher and learner. New teachers will find a comprehensive introduction to innovative ways of teaching and learning. Experienced educators will be surprised by the range of useful pedagogies, such as translanguaging, crossover learning, teachback, bricolage and rhizomatic learning. Policy makers will gain evidence of how new teaching methods work in practice, with resources for curriculum design and course development.

Drawing on material from the hugely influential Innovating Pedagogy series of reports, this book is a compilation of the 40 most relevant pedagogies, covering:

• innovative ways to teach and learn;
• how pedagogies are adopted in new ways for a digital age;
• evidence on how and why different methods of teaching work, including case studies set in classrooms, informal settings, and online learning spaces;
• practical implications of the latest research into the science of learning, combining psychology, education, social sciences and neuroscience.

Organised around six themes – Personalization, Connectivity, Reflection, Extension, Embodiment and Scale – Practical Pedagogy is a comprehensive source for teachers, policy makers, educational researchers and anyone interested in new ways to teach and learn.

Innovative pedagogy 1

In July 1913, the New York Dramatic Mirror, a theatrical trade newspaper, reported an interview with the inventor Thomas Edison. The newspaper asked Edison for his views on the future of the motion picture. Like many entrepreneurs, Edison couldn’t resist the opportunity to speculate on how his invention would improve society. Here is how the newspaper reported his words:

“Books,” declared the inventor with decision, “will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It will be possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed inside of ten years.”

Even at the time, this prediction was treated with scepticism and derision. One commentator remarked “O joy! Books in the public school will soon be obsolete, Edison predicts”. In recent years, Edison’s remarks have been resurrected to show how 100 years of technology have not transformed classroom teaching, nor made books obsolete.

The power of pedagogy

However, Edison was not only trying to promote a new educational technology (the classroom movie projector) but also a new method of teaching “through the eye”. His quoted words continue:

We have been working for some time on the school pictures. We have been studying and reproducing the life of the fly, mosquito, silk weaving moth, brown moth, gypsy moth, butterflies, scale and various other insects, as well as chemical chrystallization [sic]. It proves conclusively the worth of motion pictures in chemistry, physics and other branches of study, making the scientific truths, difficult to understand from text books, plain and clear to children.

Learning from short animated movies is still a hot topic of research. Animations can help students understand complex dynamic processes, such as how the heart pumps blood or chemicals crystallize. New interactive software apps, such as an animated periodic table, a simulation of animal breeding and a virtual planetarium offer ways to learn “through the eye” that would have delighted Edison. This book covers these in Chapter 19. Edison got the technology wrong, but the pedagogy right.

If we focus on how new technology may or may not change education, we are missing the more important and enduring transformations brought by pedagogy – the theory and practice of teaching, learning and assessment. New pedagogies may well involve technology, but the emphasis is on improving how people learn, not just introducing devices into classrooms.

Here are two examples of how new pedagogies are changing education. Until the 1970s, almost all research in educational innovation was about individualized instruction – how to match teaching content to the needs and activities of individual students. Then, findings from social psychology began to show the value of working together. When students cooperate in small groups of between four and eight people, they are more creative and have better outcomes than when they work alone. For many students, learning in groups is not a natural process, so they need to learn how to cooperate by arguing constructively and resolving conflicts. Schools and colleges now make time for group learning activities. New methods of learning through conversation and teamwork have been developed for online distance education.

Another educational success story is constructive feedback, where students learn by getting immediate responses to their actions and answers. These can come from a teacher, another learner or from a computer. Giving feedback is most successful when it helps a learner to improve, by finding out how to correct a misunderstanding or to build new knowledge in reaching a goal. A student learns something and thinks she understands it, she is tested on that learning and finds some missing or faulty knowledge, then she is helped to correct it.

The science of learning

By emphasizing pedagogy rather than technology, we get to the core of how people learn and how to make teaching more effective. In a paper for the journal Science, Andrew Meltzoff, Patricia Kuhl, Javier Movellan and Terrence Sejnowski laid foundations for an interdisciplinary science of human learning that brings together findings from psychology, education, social sciences, neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

They started by pointing out that humans are the only species to have developed formal ways to enhance learning, through teachers, schools and curricula. Every human being from birth is equipped with a powerful mechanism for learning. Meltzoff and colleagues describe human learning from three perspectives: computational, social and neural.

As computational beings, we learn from experience by forming structured models of our environment. For example, we learn the difference between a dog and a cat, the taste of an apple or a pear, or the voice of mother or a stranger. This process can be simulated on computers through methods of ‘machine learning’ that show how learning can happen without direct teaching, through observation and inference. New computer models of ‘deep learning’ are starting to show how our brains are able to recognize scenes or concepts. They also provide powerful tools for computer-based face recognition or automated car driving.

As social beings, we learn by copying others, starting with our parents. Young babies can match gestures that are shown to them, such as opening their mouths or sticking out their tongues. This imitation game is particularly remarkable because babies can do it even before they have seen their own faces in a mirror. It is a foundation for learning through apprenticeship – following other people and gaining their skills – and for empathy, in regulating emotions and sympathizing with other people. Imitation is also the basis for learning language. Experiments with young children have shown that they are able to pick up a foreign language quickly when interacting with other humans, but not by just watching TV or listening to the radio.

As neural beings, we possess brains of great complexity. Each human brain has around 85 billion brain cells, or neurons, each connected with up to 10,000 other neurons. Learning happens in the brain by modifying the connections, called synapses, between neurons, so that the links are strengthened or weakened. Each new word, fact or skill we learn causes a change in the circuitry of the brain. Young children’s learning may seem effortless as they pick up language through games and conversation, but it is accompanied by high brain activity.

The paradox of pedagogy

Humans are remarkable learning systems. We learn by imitation, instruction, conversation, self-reflection and exploration. Our learning starts at birth and continues throughout our lives. On average, adults engage in 13–17 hours per week of active learning, with around eight major learning projects a year, such as learning a foreign language, a sport or a new skill. Bookshops and TV schedules are filled with advice on gardening, cooking and home repair.

The paradox of pedagogy is that humans can’t stop learning – yet we often find it hardest to learn what other people want to teach us. The education system of schools, colleges and universities has evolved over centuries to provide a foundation of knowledge and skills that are needed in society and the workplace. But sitting young people in classrooms, instructing them in times tables or chemical elements, then examining them on their recall of this knowledge, is a highly inefficient way of preparing them for life. So, what are the alternatives?

There is no single answer to that question. As Table...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Innovative pedagogy
• Part I Personalization
• Part II Connectivity
• Part III Reflection
• Part IV Extension
• Part V Embodiment
• Part VI Scale
• Index