28 March: final formal session...

...although there may be more after Easter on request, as well as the individual tutorials.

Critical Incidents


Lest there be any extra confusion beyond what I may well have already engendered--

• You do not have to construct your submission around one or more "critical incidents." That was merely a suggestion and an informal exercise for our class discussions. The actual requirements are all in the Handbook--if all else fails, fall back on them.
  
• Critical incidents can be "good" or "bad"; as we discussed when we talked about the Interest Groups at the Study Day, sometimes the puzzle is "where did it all go right?" and that can be more revealing than picking over problems.
  
• They can be exceptional or routine; the exceptional highlights features through their variation from the normal, and the routine because their taken-for-granted quality points to the key features which make your sessions what they normally are.

We briefly re-visited Laura's incident from our previous session, and discussed what it said about the selection of elements, packets, or sequences of skills to be practised and rehearsed together. I suggested that the definitive reference is: Charness N, Feltovich P, Hoffman R and Ericsson K (2006) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance Cambridge; C.U.P. (But warned you that it's 900 pages!) Much of the interesting stuff is covered more accessibly and indeed entertainingly in Syed M (2010) Bounce; the myth of talent and the power of practice London; Fourth Estate.

And that linked to the issue of repetitive exercises, and when one can move on. That raises the issue of the  learning curve, and the point at which one has to take the risk/plunge of going on to the next stage. (And as we discussed in another context, that underpins the approach to the assessment, too...)

Rebecca C posed the problem of transferability--material learned in one session is apparently forgotten in another. This illustrates a couple of issues:

• Coding: Material needs to be learned at the appropriate level to be portable/transferable. The Dale/Bruner model is discussed here. (Note that I got the labels wrong-I thought I might. Sorry! The arguments stands.)
  
• ...and that led to a brief note on how other cognitivists like Ausubel (advance organizers) rely on rich experience-based material as a hook on which to hang other more abstract learning
  
• Cuing: This interesting study on Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget suggests that how and where a memory is formed is an important cue for its recall, and may complicate the transfer of learning from one setting to another.

...and, in the light of Sue Cowley, Emma raised the matter of ground rules for behaviour. What happens when there is a difference of opinion within the class about the operation of the ground rules--over a trivial infraction, in the last class of the course? An insightful discussion had you digging behind the scenes, as it were, to discuss how a member might feel excluded by fellow-learners conversing in their first language (thus excluding a native English speaker) even about an on-task topic;  whether all members can appreciate priorities and exceptions in the application of the rules...

Stuff we have not covered...

We've mentioned a great deal of material in passing but not gone into it in detail--this blog serves as a means of reminding us about it. One issue we have not discussed at all, however, is technology and learning.

You all work in largely low-tech environments, so I consider myself excused from having to introduce the much-vaunted wonders of e-learning, and contented myself with a simple take-away message--the technology is not neutral. From the hand-written book to Twitter on your mobile, it changes not only how you teach but what you can and can't teach....

The assessment (no, it's NOT an assignment!)

Rebecca raised an interesting point about the "angle" of this unit in relation to that of those of Year 2. Year 2 zooms out a bit as it were, and mostly looks at issues in broader contexts (with the conspicuous exception of the action research project), so keep this unit's submission close to your actual practice, as we have discussed--and as the presentation from a fortnight ago recommends.

(Incidentally this set up some discussion/speculation about the latest report and consultation from BIS.)

We consulted about tutorials on the submission proposal, and provisionally fixed dates and times--please let me know if you need to change anything, and feel free to send me a draft of the proposal. There is no deadline for the proposal--its principal function is to provide you with peace of mind about the acceptability of your plan, and your submission will be accepted even without it (apart from the ethics undertaking), but it does make sense to run it past me, and the deadline is 11 May, although of course submissions are welcome earlier.

Have a good break!

PS; All relevant presentations on SlideShare have been set to be downloadable until the deadline.