Pedagogy.
Someone asked me what pedagogy meant the other day.
A genuine question.
And she really made me think.
Of course, it’s the study of the principles, theories and practice of teaching. But I started to think about what people perceive the traditional view of teaching to be.
That’s more didactic. I tell you information, I impart knowledge, and you listen and learn it.
Some teaching is made of up this, definitely. But such a teacher-heavy approach is only a small facet of what’s going on.
The problem with this approach alone is that knowledge-based learning is right down at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy (a hierarchy of learning from the simplest/most superficial to the most complex and deep). It is the easiest learning model to forget.
But one aspect of considered pedagogy is the use of skilful questioning which helps the learner to think and, even better, to work the concept out for themselves.
So a knowledge-based question would be….what scale is this shown below? Sure, it’s G major. And of course you could “tell” then it’s got an F# in it, they learn to play it, and off they go.
Three months later, they’ve forgotten it unless they have a scale book.
But think of this.
- what do you notice about where the sweets are placed?
- are there any patterns?
- are any notes repeated? Why?
- what do you notice about the distance between each consecutive note?
- why is there only one black key in this?
- what would it sound like if that weren’t a black key?
- how would you show this pattern to someone else?
- how about taking the sweets away and creating a melody using those notes on this rhythm I’m going to give you?
- what if we took one of the red ones away? Would it still be a scale?
- what makes a scale a scale?
Can you see how the questioning starts to engage their thinking and reasoning? And each of these is a treasure trove of ideas: subsequent questions would reflect the current level of a learner’s understanding based on their responses, and would pose other questions to support their learning or pose “what ifs” based on their conjectures.
Can you see how much deeper, how much richer, how much more enjoyable that learning becomes rather than “here’s a G major scale. You play it like this. It has F#. Remember it”?
Pedagogy is based on thinking, understanding, providing meaningful learning experiences that are very far from being superficial. In that way, learning lasts for a lifetime.
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