Ania Lian (ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au)
Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:59:50 +1000 (EST)
Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 08:59:50 +1000 (EST) From: Ania Lian <ania@lingua.arts.uq.edu.au> Subject: Re: IFETS-DISCUSS Digest - 12 Feb 1999 to 13 Feb 1999
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On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Lora Kaisler wrote:
> When we at the Center @ IMSA, Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, use
> the term "coaching" as a way to build "higher order thinking skills", we do
> not advocate "acting as police of meaning". The questioning and probing
> used in cognitive coaching is inquiry-based.
I think an inquiry-based learning is an important point regarding the goal
of education and one capable of generating innovative thinking about the
HOW of this goal.
The concern of may previous post regarding teachers acting as police of
meaning ties well with the question of the HOW. In my view, the dilema
lies in the relationship between the goals that pedagogues strive toward
and the strategies they mobilise for their attaining.
That is, in regard to an inquiry-based learning, I worry that the nature
of pedagogue's interference with the inquiry process may in fact turn that
inquiry into a process where the goal for an inquiry is compromised and
the teacher's expectations as to its path and results take over. Thus te
dificulty may not be a matter of the objectives but a question of their
translation into the practice of pedagogy.
For example, let us consier the following strategies:
* allow "wait time" after asking questions,
* avoid yes and no questions/one word answers,
* avoid the temptation to correct immediately or interrupt,
* avoid feedback that cues students to the "rightness of their
"wrongness"
While there is nothing wrong with them per se, in themselves I cannot see
why they would be selected as specifically effective in a problem-based
learning. I think that educationists should do exactly the opposite to
what most teachers think they want i.e. to step away from concepts and to
the level of steps to be taken in practice at the level of the detail as
the strategies above show. I think so because in so doing, we reemove from
the teacher the power to think critically and inovatively and we give them
a certain level of comfort which translates: if you do this, you are doing
well.
This comfort zone worries me not only in regard to teaching teachers but
also in regard to the coaching methodology as I have come to know it. In
my field, coaching means to gradually acquire the knowledge to be
acquired. Once conceptualised in this way, we may find that in the whole
process of thinking about didactics we forget that the objective of being
critcal begins with us. But then again, I am talking from the perspective
of a field which has its specific historically driven ideological problems
to conquer. To others my comments may be read as nothing other than
redicovering the wheel:-)
Ania Lian
http://education.canberra.edu.au/~andrewl/mlal2
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