The past few weeks I have been preparing for an interstate move. It is an exciting time with many fresh opportunities on the horizon. It has also involved lots of boxes which has gotten me thinking about the boxes of thought that shape our practice as educators.
We all have lots of boxes and into these we sort our beliefs about teaching and learning.
We have a box for all our beliefs about how we might teach our students. We label this our pedagogy. It contains ideas about the teaching philosophies we agree with and those we aim to avoid. We go to this box as we consider how we might best design learning opportunities for our students.
We also have a box that contains all of our thinking about curriculum. In this are our ideas about the learning that matters to our students now and in their futures. It also contains our beliefs about how the curriculum should be structured: an overarching framework. Alongside this we have another box that is gifted to us. This box is also labelled curriculum but it contains the curriculum that is handed to us by the educational systems. The contents of these two boxes may or may not look similar.
We also have a box that contains what we know about our learners. We develop this through experience and it expands over time to contain our ever changing understanding of what makes the individuals we teach function. The contents of this box should be shaped by the contents of the box that holds our knowledge about the attributes of learners in general as informed by a mix of psychology, sociology and educational research.
Amidst this collection of large boxes lie a myriad of other boxes. School policy has a box all of its own as does timetabling and daily structures all of which have a great impact on how we engage with the ideas in the other boxes. There are boxes of external and internal assessments and there are boxes who’s contents is shaped by the expectations, hopes, fears and beliefs of our parent body.
The most interesting thing about all of these boxes is the manner in which they interact. If we pack each box in isolation from the others, we end up with a very fragmented view of our role and the impact we might have is diminished. Our goal needs to be to see the boxes holistically and to ensure that the contents of each aligns with the others. When it comes time to unpack all of these boxes into their new home, we might hope that all of the items will combine well and bring a unifying theme.
Often though this is not the case. We might hold particular views about pedagogy which do not align with our views on curriculum or with our understanding of how students best learn. Only by looking closely at the contents of each box and then also considering how the contents of all of the boxes interact can we maximise our impact.
By Nigel Coutts