Masters of Teaching Mind Dump #9

You can find previous Brain Dumps here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8.

Another slightly brief mind dump for the past week of my Masters of Teaching studies. I'm in the home stretch of completing the barrage of assignments that happened to land within close range of each other and that were complicated by the week of music recording work as well. As always, I'm incredibly thankful for my wife who has taken up the parenting slack these last couple of weeks whilst I'm heads down and trying not to freak out! This is the benefit of having two freelancers in the house, one week I'm the main housekeeper and child caretaker... and the other week it will be her... of course, there are those weeks where we are both freaking out in unison! But those are matched the weeks where we are all completely free from commitments!

So, the first of the week's assignments was handed in. An observation of two Year 7 classrooms with a focus on how non-verbal communication could affect the delivery and reception of a lesson. It was quite interesting, but weird to see it all codified in books and academic literature. As a musician, it is the sort of thing that you know and do intuitively... so to see that it is studied to death is really quite strange! Also... it makes it hard to write a proper paper/essay on it without stopping at "Duh... you think?".

Still, it is quite funny to see how the most basic skills of presentation and nuance are written about and how people try to implement them. For me, in my music life, it is the sort of thing that I do in managing my "private" and "stage" personas. These are two distinctly different roles and characters that I am conscious of... sometimes, people are really quite surprised to know that I'm much more shy and introvert than my "stage" persona would suggest! I guess that a teacher needs to do something similar... especially if they aren't naturally an overtly engaging person in a group.

So, anyway... all of these little things lead to how well a group or class remains engaged with a lesson and the content and knowledge delivery... if people aren't listening, it doesn't matter how good you are! Plus, it affects the relationship between the teacher and the students... again, if people hate your guts, then everything you say will be coloured by that impression!

So, despite the fact that substance should be king... there shouldn't be an ignorance of the the non-verbal delivery having an impact on the effectiveness of lesson giving!

I'm currently writing a unit plan for a series of lessons on Linear Equations... I was going to write more about the assignment now during my break... but it turns out that I've hit a stupid export error in the Program Builder. So, instead of completing this post... I've got to try and trouble shoot the problem so that I can hand the assingnment in.

If I've learnt nothing else, I've learnt that Education as the SHITTIEST IT tools...