To begin with, it is always important to consider (as it was mentioned in this chapter) not only the teachers' requirements when creating and teaching a course, but also the students' needs to understand" how to learn" and "how to perform" besides other issues. It's on the teachers' role to help students improve their abilities to accomplish their understandings about the goals of their learning.
Worth mentioning are the content standards or learning outcomes we find in educational planning. The overload content becomes a problem, because most of the time teachers are asked to teach too much content, e.g. all the units of a book, not having enough time to focus adequately on their students' needs and interests. In the long run, they are obliged to limit their work beyong their wills.
Probably, the idea to focus on Big ideas and design around them could help much better frame teaching and assessment as well as help students encourage reflective work.
I think we agree on the point that the overload content helps us miss the aim of our priorities in our learners' understanding and reflective teaching.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is really hard to do a good and complete job. Contents always have to be shortened because of time, problems, etc etc. It is an endless war.
ReplyDeleteAs teachers we know that there are too many contents to be taught. But whenever we decided to condense them for the sake of setting learning priorities, we felt that we are not doing our job properly.
ReplyDeletewhen you spoke about overload, I remembered the last presentation we did about mexico and its educational reform. It was surprising to me that they DID think about the overload of their students plus their unhappiness with their subjects and the stressful environment of their school. It was positively surprising that the consider those factors as the main reasosn to modify their educational system. That's thinking about their students. That's something we should starting doing from now.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, in my opinion, is that Big ideas usually imply a lot of planning and organization. I have recently had many brain waves, but I hardly have enough time to do the minimum.
ReplyDelete