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Link to the Critical and Creative Lecture on 24 March, 2015

Using games in humanities

Understanding play is critical to understanding learning
Play is the basis for cultivating imagination and innovation
Seely and Brown

So what about this play thing? For many educators play is recognized as a critical tool for children. They consider that through play they come to understand, experience, and know the world. However as we get older (and the teaching force fits into this category), play is seen as unimportant, trivial, or as a means of relaxation and learning switches to something you do in school where now you are taught.

“What we fail to fully grasp is that play is the way that children manage new, unexpected and changing conditions, exactly the situation we now all face in the fast-paced world of the 21st century. Play is more than a tool to manage change; it allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change —a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century.”

Seely and Brown believe play as part of a new culture of learning does the above in four ways:
1) By thinking about the problem as a crisis in learning rather than teaching
2) By looking at the incredible power of new cultures of learning that are happening already and understanding what makes them successful
3) By tapping new resources: peer to peer learning, amplified by the power of the collective, which favors things like questing dispositions over transfer models of education and embraces play as a modality of exploration, experimentation, and engagement.
4) By understanding how to optimize the resources (and freedom) of large networks, while at the same time affording personal and individual agency constrained within a problem space created by a bounded learning environment.
Play provides freedom to act in new ways which are different from "everyday life" within a set of rules that constrain that freedom. Think of any game a kid creates of make-believe. It is both fantasy and it has to have rules (which may be arbitrary and even ridiculous), but what it results in is a world of imagination and something entirely new and innovative.

In short, play cultivates imagination and innovation, two capacities critical for individuals to function and be successful in the 21st Century.

Such consideration of play brings me to the idea of games and game-type activities (simulations, quizzes, puzzles etc) in the geography classroom. Here is just a selection of free game type activities/resources available on-line which could and in the view of Seely and Brown should be embraced by the geography classroom.

Fun is OK!

* Test your knowledge of world geography
http://www.geosense.net/

* Games for Change curates digital and non-digital games that engage contemporary social issues in a meaningful way. These games have been created by cross-disciplinary teams from around the world.

Ideas to inspire: Online Geography Gaming: This site contains links and background to hundreds of online games and simulations for use in the geography classroom. The site also has ideas and links to ICT and on-line collaboration tools. An amazing one-stop shop for teachers to incorporate games and fun into the classroom for students to learn.

Here is a selection from the excellent Ideas to inspire site (28 out of the 102 profiled on the site)

* Electrocity

* Stop disasters

* 3rd World farmer

* Sim sweatshop

* Darfur is dying

* McDonalds game

* My Sus House

* My abodo

* Flood Sim

* Google Flight Sim

* Sporcle: Place based games

* Place games and quizzes

* Classic Sim City

* Oil and extraction

* Free poverty

* Global rich

* Trans Aid: transport issues and aid

* Refugees: Against all odds

* Climate change Pentathlon

* Food force: Humanitarian food game

*Race against global poverty

* Climate challenge

* Earthquake: make a quake

* Urban plan

*Environmental quiz game

* Shipping

* Virtual volcano

* Map Zone games

Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Some lesson and unit plans template

Here are some templates that you can use for your lesson plan and unit plan assignments. Will talk more about them in tutorials over the next week. Feel free to add to the templates if you see a need for your personal use.
Regards
Malcolm

Lesson plan template

Unit plan template

Inquiring about Inquiry!

The questions are:

On the ‘teller’/Inquiry spectrum I am …

To be successful Inquiry needs to be ...

What are the stages of Inquiry in the Australian Curriculum: Geography?

What are the stages of Inquiry in the Australian Curriculum: History?

What are the advantages for learning of the Inquiry approach?

What are some of the issues to keep in mind when planning an inquiry approach?

I think there is far too much emphasis on inquiry approaches in the classroom

Inquiry does not necessarily improve learning.

Why can it be said that Inquiry has the potential to be abused in the classroom.

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Teacher support for inquiry

In viewing numerous classroom scenarios on inquiry, we see the principle of inductive reasoning at the center of the teacher’s approach. Students begin with a source – a cup or a dress and their thinking and reasoning is guided to begin firstly with the particular and then branching out to the more general.

Inductive reasoning means restricting oneself to sources and then formulating statements based on them. Sources are used as a starting point to inquiry, - further research will hopefully result from this activity. The kind of research the students will be carrying out will be inductive as they will be establishing facts directly referred to by the sources and they will be making inferences from the sources they are working with and researching further.

Principle number 1. Start with the particular, move out to the general. Otherwise the opposite of this is deductive reasoning which consists in passing from the ‘the universal’ to ‘the particular’. It is less likely that a primary school student will know how to draw conclusions from certain general truths.

The second principle that underpins this type of inquiry is active, student centred learning – but well supported and scaffolded by the teacher. It’s what Webster calls “light assistance”. Pedagogically speaking the approach is robust – it sits very much within a context of social constructivism. The interaction between you and the student is crucial even though you may think this approach is all about handing over responsibility for learning to the student. Yes, that’s partly true. Good inquiry methodology results in the interaction between adult and student guiding student thinking (From Sage on the Stage to Guide on the Side). Teachers have a vital role to play developing effective inquiry learning which includes initiating good questions to research and to analyse and to come up with reasoned meaningful conclusions. By promoting active learning – that is not just doing but thinking-- in classrooms the learning outcomes are more likely to become intellectually embedded says Hutchings, “what we discover, we retain”

The third principle underpinning inquiry learning is the use of open ended questioning, resulting in deep levels of engagement with problems that are likely to be multifaceted and complex. Its nature is exploratory (Hutchings, 2007). Hutchings says that the core of inquiry is the question and it is in the formulation and ‘or the analysis of that question that the important initial intellectual activity takes place. Philosophically it is a Socratic based activity - Socratic perception that our knowledge is formed by questions.

Students participate in acts of discovery, grappling with different ways of looking at ideas and issues and thinking creatively about problems that do not necessarily have simple answers.

The 'Instructional Strategies online' site succinctly sums up inquiry methodology when it says:

Using inquiry, students become actively involved in the learning process as they:

* act upon their curiosity and interests;
* develop questions;
* think their way through controversies or dilemmas;
* look at problems analytically;
* inquire into their preconceptions and what they already know;
* develop, clarify, and test hypotheses; and,
* draw inferences and generate possible solutions.

Inquiring, not telling!

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Spatialworlds posting on inquiring to read

* Inquiring about inquiry with the Australian Curriculum: Geography.

* Back to the future with inquiry questions

It is more than telling!

Inquiry (in UK they talk about enquiry) is a word that is frequently thrown around when 21st Century curriculum is being developed.

The thinking is that students will be more connected to their learning and engaged to explore if they are stimulated to think via a range of inquiry questions on a topic/area of study:

"Tell me and I forget, show me and I remember, involve me and I understand." Joe Exline

Inquiry implies involvement that leads to understanding. Furthermore, involvement in learning implies possessing skills and attitudes that enable students to seek resolutions to questions and issues while constructing new knowledge. Useful application of inquiry learning involves several factors: a context for questions, a framework for questions, a focus for questions, and different levels of questions.

Inquiry Based Learning has fast become an accepted way for curriculum to be written, with student exploration, engagement and empowerment seen as positive outcomes .

However there needs to be a caveat to the use of Inquiry Based Learning in the curriculum. It is not a stand-alone approach but rather an approach which relies on an infrastructure of skills, thinking and foundation knowledge to ensure that the inquiry has rigour, veracity and sound conceptual understandings – it needs to be informed inquiry and not just ‘off-the top of the head emoting’ or ramblings based on minimal or uninformed, if not biased sources.

There is a potential for Inquiry Based Learning to be mis-used and abused by teachers without the skills, knowledge or understanding themselves on a particular geographical topic. To avoid such mis-use, the January 2011 Australian Curriculum shape paper for geography (page 21) attempted to develop a geography orientated inquiry process with rigour.

‘Geographical inquiry refers to the methodologies that geographers use to find new knowledge, or knowledge that is new to them, and the ways that they attempt to understand and explain what they have observed’

Naturally technology has a huge part to play in the development of a rigorous and valid inquiry methodology in the humanities. http://www.edutopia.org/lesson-planning-inquiry-modeling

Saturday, March 5, 2016

Front-ending or backward designing

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

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Teachers are designers. An essential act of our profession is the design of curriculum and learning experiences to meet specified purposes. We are also designers of assessments to diagnose student needs to guide our teaching and to enable us, our students, and others (parents and administrators) to determine whether our goals have been achieved, that is, did the students learn and understand the desired knowledge?

Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

Understanding by Design, backward design!

In recent years the area of designing curriculum has become of prime importance in schools. This is particularly critical as schools begin to become familiar with and deconstruct the Australian Curriculum for the purpose of designing appropriate learning and teaching program for their students. The theory which has been adopted as the way to go is from the work of Wiggins and McTighe in the area of Backward Design. Everywhere one goes, where curriculum is being developed and implemented we hear the term UBD or rather Understanding By Design.

Backward Design planning is a rather logical and reasonable idea which has always been the way of operation for many teachers, but not all.

By clearly articulating the UBD process, Wiggins and McTighe have created a way of thinking which has had great penetration into the area of curriculum planning and in turn pedagogy.

A few observations and gems of comment from the readings on Wiggins and McTighe

• Teachers are designers.

• "Clarifying the desired results of our teaching, how will we ever know whether our designs are appropriate or arbitrary?"

• How will we distinguish merely interesting learning from effective learning?

• Good design, … is about learning to be more thoughtful and specific about our purposes and what they imply.

• The shift involves thinking a great deal, first, about the specific learnings sought, and the evidence of such learning, before thinking about what we as the teacher, will do or provide in teaching and learning activities.

• "The challenge is to focus first on the desired learnings from which appropriate teaching will logically follow."

• “...best designs derive backward from the learnings sought.”

• “...too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning.”

• Content focused design versus results focused design.

• Answering the "why?" and "so what?" questions as the focus of curriculum planning.

• Twin sins:
* activity-oriented design might be called "hands-on without being minds-on" primary-middle years)
* aimless coverage (upper secondary)

• Students require clear purposes and explicit performance goals.

• Grasp the key idea that we are not coaches of their ability to play the "game" or performing with understanding, not tellers of our understanding to them on the sidelines.

• Three stages of Backward Design = Identify desired result - Determine acceptable evidence - Plan learning experience and instruction.

A related reading on progression was also set for this week’s workshop. Here are some comments from the work of Hoodless: Planning for progression and opportunities for the development of key skills

• Long, medium and short term planning.

• Australian curriculum is taking care of the long term planning?

• Key questions to draw together medium term planning.

• “...link the skills. concepts and factual content together around a central question, which is likely to interest the children.”

• “Short-term planning refers to the planning of individual lessons by the class teacher.”

• “Objectives, often expressed as key questions, are the knowledge, skills or understanding which you will want the children to have learned by the end of the lesson'

• Planning process = Previous knowledge and understanding - Specific learning intentions - Planned learning experience.

• "Hierarchy of thinking skills, which interact with language, and also depend on maturation; learning is seen as a developmental process."

• The thinking skills listed:
* Information processing
* Reasoning
* Inquiry
* Creative thinking
* Evaluation

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Assessment and curriculum making

Image above: The Geography Association in the UK. An amazing resource and the leaders in the concept of curriculum making.

Related sites to Humsteach blog
Spatialworlds
Australian Curriculum Portal
Geogaction
DECD Learning Resources for Australian Curriculum
DECD Achievement Standards Charts
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
Geography Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of Australia

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