I am back everyone! Here to bewilder and amaze you in my journey through this Master of Education.
This summer I have 2 masters courses (as a student), in addition to developing and re-designing my own courses (as an educator). Besides this being a lofty goal, lets address the elephant in the room. Educators have no idea what their classes will look like in the fall due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This adds a whole new level to, well lets face it, EVERYTHING. Not only does my planning for fall, need to alter, and allow for the unknown. My view on every topic and discussion is coloured by our new reality as educators.
Okay now to the point of this post – here we go again.
It feels as if every time I THINK I’ve figured this “teachin” thing out, something changes. Yes, this keeps us on our toes, and provides ample opportunities to refine and evaluate educational pedagogies. And yes, if things didn’t change, our jobs as educators would get very boring. But I (naively) thought I would have one year without major adjustments. But here we go again, another opportunity to reflect on my own practices, courses, and pedagogies, to (hopefully) make meaningful changes.
So where do we start? Well from the end of course.
Once you know where you want to end (learning objective, goals, etc.) then it is far easier to plan HOW to get to WHAT you want to accomplish. Once educators set their end goals, then they will be able to plan accordingly. This provides some flexibility in the “how”, which is extremely important when there are multiple unknowns. I wish I could give you a better idea of what to do at this point, but I can’t. All I know is I need to determine my end point to clear a path. We may not know what that looks like yet, but we’ll get there eventually.
I leave you with the inspirational lyrics of Whitesnake:
“No, I don’t know where I’m goin’; But I sure know where I’ve been”
“Though I keep searchin’ for an answer; I never seem to find what I’m lookin’ for”
“And here I go again on my own; Goin’ down the only road I’ve ever known”
Good Luck Fellow Educators! Here’s to us once again finding a way in a new/unknown situation.
Images retrieved from Pixabay
I too naively thought I would have a year without major adjustments. However, teaching remotely the past few months allowed me to test out some strategies and learn what may work and may not work going into the fall. Thanks for the reminder to start with the end goal in mind – I usually start there and then get distracted in other planning. My hope for this coming year is that I can consistently make the end goal clear in my learning activities and assessment clear to students. My first step on this path is to use the curricular competency language to link to learning activities.
Awesome post! I really enjoyed the inspirational lyrics and your reflective comments that echo many of the sentiments I have felt over this year.
I agree with your approach of starting with concrete “what to teach” and choosing different “how to teach” methods that may best reach those goals or support students with needs. Perhaps it’s because I’m more familiar with the process in this fashion. It would be interesting to see context-specific input from those who can do it in reverse.