Professional Studies Lecture 1

ESA160 - Professional Studies 1A.

The course has undergone a lot of change since last year, most of which regards the proportion of lectures and tutorials: this year’s course features more tutorial time and the tutorials have a more central role; they are practising what they preach in that they are going to be teaching us in the same way that want us to teach.

During the first 45 minutes, there was a little bit of touchy, feely stuff (the degree is not just a journey into teaching, it’s also a journey into knowing ourselves, etc., etc.), but on the whole it was a very interesting first hour.

In a few weeks, we will be starting our professional experience with the School University Partnership Programme (or SUPP), during which we each spend every Monday in a classroom observing specific facets of education in a real learning environment. The goal of SUPP is to give us some experience in the practice of education to help ground our understanding of the theory that we’ll be learning during lectures. While we don’t have any choice which school we wind up visiting, I am quite looking forward to it.

The lectures during the rest of the semester will focus on four themes:

• Professional Perspectives: Teacher Identity;
• Development in an Educational Context;
• Schools and Schooling; and
• Curriculum and Pedagogy.

There are three required texts for the course, though one of them can be left until next semester: How to Make a Classroom Management Plan^(buy) by Robert Cope, Educational Psychology for Learning and Teaching^(buy) by Kerri-Lee Krause, Sandra Bochner and Sue Duchesne and Case Studies in Teaching and Learning: Australian Perspectives^(buy) by Nola Purdie and David Smith.

According to the lecturer (whose voice reminded me of the woman from a popular show about current affairs on NPR), these same books will be used for professional studies during all four semester of the degree, so they'll be a good investment (especially compared to some of the $90+ books I bought for by Bachelor of Computing and didn't even open). She described Cope as a very good book (published last year); Krause as comprehensive, up to date and used throughout the degree; and said that we won't really need Purdie until next semester.

The recommended texts are The Teaching for Understanding Guide by Tina Blythe (the theory upon which the Essential Learnings Framework of the Tasmanian Department of Education is based), Effective Teaching Strategies: Lessons from research and practice by R. Killen (good; basic teaching strategy; practice in theoretical context) and Disability in Australia: Exposing a social apartheid by Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell (about special needs education in an Australian context).

20% of our final grade will come from our attendance and participation in tutorial and the remainder will be based on the documents we produce as a result of our observations during SUPP.

---

After about 45 minutes on administrivia, the lecturer moved on to looking at the topic of question and questioning. She began by presenting some dialogue typical of a teacher and students. The teacher used questions to provoke the students into thinking and to lead them to understanding of the topic by drawing an analogy between an orchestra (which needs a conductor to keep the players co-ordinated) and the hormonal system (which also requires co-ordination).

She presented five purposes for which questions are asked:

1. for review or revision;
2. to make connections;
3. for teacher feedback;
4. to encourage students to ask questions (modelling); and
5. to cause students to use a variety of thinking processes.

She then questioned reason four: how often do students ask non-procedural questions (that is, questions other than "What page are we on?" and the like) of their teacher? She finished by examining the term question in more detail (the online OED's entry for the word "question" is 9 pages long, apparently).

It looks, so far, that this is going to be a really interesting unit.