What it takes to teach - Curriculum Design

Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science : Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology   Retrieved from http://UQL.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=957058

This chapter discusses the different factors that play a role in curriculum design, most notably things like:

• Motivational approach of students vs that of teachers
• Pre-requisites required by professional governing bodies
• Learning outcomes
• The knowledge students currently have
• Logistics

It focuses on discussing the factors that as teachers we can impact and employ best practice upon. Therefore issues such as logistics which affect the types of learning activities implemented are not discussed here.

I particular the first 3 pages were not enjoyable to read as it talked too much about what was coming up in the chapter and gave a history lesson which could be best summed up as: lots of different people came up with ways to improve learning but many of them contradict each other or are unrealistic as they didn't originate from a classroom environment. A similar observation is stated by Entwistle.

I especially liked the line as it is relevant to my Confucian vs. Socratarian argument for my paper:

"...experiential learning methods over more didactic approaches, because learners are more likely to be engaged in trying to achieve a goal that makes sense to them. Didactic teaching has to work harder to engage the learner's interest." 

It also mentions something about having students influence and shape your learning outcomes but this type of curriculum design is never seen anywhere. It would seem to me that the waffle-load of text is pretty much just trying to say design your course based on your learning outcomes and work backwards. 

A section that made some sense describes the need to make sure as a teacher you are designing to figure out how your students think and learn. Also identifying their 'alternative conceptions' that they had previously. and the new ones they are developing along the way. But like much of the article, it's so general; I'm not sure I can take anything specifically useful out of it. 

I liked the idea of designing an intrinsic feedback system where the students learn by comparing their answer to a model answer to work out where they went wrong and learn themselves. The predict-observe-explain model is also a nice way to teach. It helps iron out threshold concepts where students can predict what they think will happen, be confounded when something doesn't happen then after an explanation they can formulate a new conception. This learning strategy is titled cognitive conflict.

I find a huge conflict in these papers in that they all try to promote getting the students to generate their own learning. Yet if you talk to the majority of undergraduate students, they don't want this type of learning, they'd much rather be told what to do and not have to reflect on their own learning processes. Whilst I agree that reflection and self-learning is much better deep-learning-wise and will lead to much better results down the track; what good is it if student don't engage in the learning activity because they don't want/not motivated to learn that way! My backing point of this would be when this article mentions that we should design activities with students' motivation and expectations in mind (Fig. 5.1 in the article).

What a boring article is my summary.