PEDAGOGY
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TEACHERS AS EXPERTS Outlining the above may sound patronising, however it does happen. And this is why I think it happens: teachers, who we can think of as experts, particularly in things such as adding and dividing numbers in fairly simple equations, often find it difficult to recognise how much new learning needs to be broken down for the learner. This is not because they are bad teachers, rather that they are experts and know how to do something without even really having to put much thought into it. As teachers, when planning and preparing our teaching, we must
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remember that there is a lot that children don’t know, that they are novices, and that if we want them to learn new things, we need to model those new things carefully and thoroughly in order to give them the best chance of being successful. So what might we need to change?
PLANNING FOR MODELLING As already mentioned, this starts at the planning stage. At this point, when sitting in your PPA session, you must be thoughtful about what the children know already, what they don’t know yet and how you are going to break
down what they don’t yet know into bite-sized chunks. The next step then is to use some of your precious planning time to work out what you are going to say and what you are going to do to show children how to be successful in this new learning, taking into consideration the concept of 2-dimensional modelling (content and procedure). Although it takes quite a lot of time, it really is worth doing. You will reap the benefits when, in the classroom, you don’t have to repeat your explanations time and time again to children who have not understood the content or the procedure.
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