The following video is from the Teaching and Learning in South Australia You Tube Channel. The video is a presentation by Val Westwall from the Teaching for Effective Learning team, DECD.

The presentation explores traditional pedagogy and the shift required to change the way our students think about the content required by the Australian Curriculum. While the example that is presented in the video is a maths one the concept of shifting pedagogy is easily transferable to any curriculum area.

The screenshot below shows four ways in which pedagogy can be shifted to improve student learning. The two that are circled are addressed in the video.

“The way that we get students thinking about the content makes a difference”. Val Westwall.

Teacher-instructed: students are passive – no thinking required. We tell students what it is we are about to teach, we explain why it is important and we show them how. We then ask students to regurgitate that information in some form.

Student constructed: open-ended questioning causing students to think. Develop transferable skills while still teaching the core content. Develop skills outside of the core content i.e. collaboration, developing opinion, justifying opinion, convincing others their opinion is the right one, proving/disproving, transfer.

Where are you as a teacher? Are your students passive in their learning? Are your students actively engaged in their learning? Do you cause your students to think?

“There is some information I just need to tell them because you can’t reason it, but there is a whole heap of the maths curriculum that actually if we ask the right questions our students can reason and construct their knowledge for themselves”. Val Westwall

The video is 24 minutes long but is worth watching and will make you think deeply about how you teach. How will you approach that first lesson of a new topic in week 1 of term 4?