16 November: final micro-teaching

Many thanks to Rebecca (creative thinking) and Lucy (criminals, prejudice and stereotyping) for ending the sequence with a flourish.

The exercises Rebecca used were great, and well chosen. As we discussed, this was not so much a free-standing session as the kind of exercise which can be used time and time again (with different scenarios) in programmes of skill development, and management development, as well as ESOL. In fact, so useful and flexible are such exercises that I would argue that every teacher should have a number of them up her sleeve, to use whenever there's a need to shift learning from object knowledge to tool knowledge, or just when you need a "party piece" to cover for an absent colleague! See: Perkins D (2010) “Threshold Experience” keynote given at 3rd Biennial Threshold Concepts Symposium, UNSW, Sydney 1-2 July 2010 (online, available http://www.thresholdconcepts2010.unsw.edu.au/speakers.html retrieved 14 November 2011)

Rebecca introduced an important distinction between (although she did not use these terms) convergent and divergent thinking. We'll visit this time and again, because it has clear implications for approaches to teaching, and of course assessment: if there are no right or wrong answers, how do you assess?  We also discussed Edward de Bono's ideas in this context, and I mentioned Ken Robinson on creativity. This is probably the best introduction to his ideas:



And moreover it's an impressive synergy between words and images, which we touched on in discussion this evening.

But also see this from just yesterday--thanks, Jim!

And then Lucy gently introduced us to issues of prejudice and stereotyping in relation to criminals. I say "gently" because she took on a really difficult topic, and did it well, but you did give her quite an easy ride. Sorry, Lucy, that is in no way to disparage your well thought-out, designed, undertaken and evaluated session! Laura was very honest when she said she didn't want to articulate her baser prejudices, because of the response she might get.

The power of prejudice comes from people's emotional investment in it, and they/we don't give it up easily. It's a powerful and satisfying way of looking at the world. Why would they/we want to give it up? See here for a more extended discussion.