didavon-moltke.bsky.social
"No lesson plan survives contact with the class". Prep and adaptivity are key. Italian humanities teacher based in Tuscany, interested in DI, di and teacher-led didactics. Take my pics with a grain of salt -and possibly humour.
"You'll learn." is my motto.
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Attainment or progress measured in terms of months?
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Nice in vivo example of misconception spread. Resembles a typical day at school
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Also, just to be clear, the research is not as cut-and-dried as the article claims. This is a very well-written overview: www.brookings.edu/articles/cla...
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Indeed. You can't say tyres don't affect car safety, if you test the tyres of a car with no gas. I teach DI and regularly circulate in class: more students means less time with each one; less students means less distractions and easier behaviour management. This must be considered.
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Any hypothesis about the reason why the screen gives more troubles (excess of light? No spacial cues such us pages (this is hinted in the article)
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They really give me a lot of maneuvre, as I can swiftly obtain informative, well written and extremely clear texts, adaptively knitted on any need emerging from the classroom. In general, I now have way greater clarity on what's going on in class, whereas I didn't know how blind I was, before.
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We teachers think we clearly see where our class is going, whereas we're just infering it from (inaccurate) navigation instruments. We're nearly blind while we think we're sharp eyed and unadvertently fill blind spots with imagination. No wonder our results stagnate throughout whole careers.
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It's another issue. Problem is, what you think is happening in the classroom and what students think are two radically different things. You were focusing on the subtleties of Hamlet's dilemmas but the students only remember his tights.
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1,2,4,5 in no special order as I see them as largely overlapping and not mutually exclusive
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Bought?
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If I got it correctly, collaboration must be intrinsic to the task. Playing a drama or a team game, fixing a car, preparing a 5 course meal can be very meaningful, but cooperation in such cases is a necessity rather than pedagogical choice. It's no free variable in instructional design.
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"Once a student has 10 stickers, they can trade those in for a homework pass", which translates "If you behave well, we'll let you actively harm you learning".
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About teaching history in the Anglo-Saxon context. I didn't listen to the podcast yet, but I wanted to save it for later (there is no bookmark on bluesky). The Italian approach is way to encyclopedic, for comparison
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Great post! I turned to DI a coule of years ago and I don't regret it. Still, I have a question: most of the examples of DI seem usually to involve younger years, whereas I'd like to find something more focussed on final years and older teens (those I work with). Is it just an impression of fime?
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doesn't seem to end up in a proportial gain. I don't think the East Asian pedagogy is bad (on the contrary, I think we have a lot to learn), but when the goal is so stricly defined, maybe there is no room enough for serendipity. Dunno, just late night thoughts. 4/4
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But this can't work in highly productive modern economies, where every effort must be a profitable investment: one can't afford to lose so much potential.
Apart from that, other countries did achieve a lot with seemingly way less exahausting ways. The effort required by the Confucian approach 3/4
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The core idea of this competitiveness stems from imperial examinations, which were hugely selective, since the posts were in strictly fixed number. Once the posts were filled, it didn't really matter that the majority of the contestants, many of them brilliant, remained virtually unproductive 2/4
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btw, rather than trying to anticipate all misconceptions, I often give my students texts thay might pose a challenge to them. I see how they struggle and find out where their gaps or misconceptions are. In this sense I depart from DI (my students are 14 to 19 yo)
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they aren't incorrect, just abstract as theory are. But we can agree we disagree on this, classically. I'm surely interested in your approach, although I teach no biology (my father is a geneticist, but that doesn't mean much here, apart from the fact I'm less scared by science than most humanists.
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As I was saying, it's an abstraction. The π is an irrational number which can't be totally defined, but this doesn't mean that builders cannot build round buildings. DI principles are the geometry part, teachers are the engineers. But the principles hold and can be referred to as right (and useful)
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I'd be less "post-modernist" on that. I can check wether they perceive correctly or not. As teaching and learning do exist and work (athe Pythagoras theorem, say, has been taught correctly for mor the 2k years), I wouldn't be pessimist.
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This is why one must aim for faultless communication. Since learning is hidden, we can assume it's going the right direction only if the input we give doesn't allow for ambiguities.
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You've to take any complex concept to its basic components and make sure you make this visible to learners. If anything obfuscates this, it must be removed or reworked. It helpes me hugely in rephrasing my explanations and in the delivery of my contents.
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Taken at face value, this should mean you never have to explain anything twice, or that you never need to check for understanding. This is not the case, of course. As I said, it's an abstractions. Iterative checking for understanding is key in DI, but its northern star is clarity
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It means you must be crystal clear about what you're are teaching, show differences from what you aren't teaching, make examples and non-examples, show purposeful variations which make the core concept (and just the core concept) stand out -without ambiguities or overlaps with other, unrelated stuff
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Engelmann defined instruction from ground principles as Euclid did with geometry (his comparison). So "communication must be faultless" is a bit like saying that between two points there can be only one straight line. It's inherently true, but it's an abstraction. A guiding abstraction, though.
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I also have some doubts about another part of the documentary, when a poem by Wordsworth is explained by another teacher in a way I don't agree with. But again, it's a short snippet isolating a detail, not the whole teaching process.
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Could you share the second clip? I'm sincerely interested. Besides, I really appreciate his approach but I don't endorse his views entirely: I strongly doubt that this collective activities, while useful, can improve the virtue or morality of the students. That's way too much. 1/2
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I also noticed that what you say. But that's just a brief clip. The super-quick pace of the pair&talk also made me think they were just parroting answers. But if you watch the whole doc, you'll see there is more to that. I still have many questions myself, but I think you might be a bit rushy here
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I often use Gemini to get history texts to share with my students (I wouldn't if I had decent textbooks). Everytime I have to specify I don't want bullet lists.
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I thought there was a missing part
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Read o?