Theme 3: Middle Schooling Pedagogies

1. Theme 3: Middle Schooling Pedagogies Chloe Francis, Nicola Holmes, Ashleigh Reeves, GordanaStancevic, Dan Ho & Sarah Arend

2. Outline of Workshop • Middle Schooling Pedagogies • Before Views Activity – Pedagogical Processes • What are the Pedagogical Processes? • Virtual Schoolbag Activity • Part 1: Analysing the case studies • Part 2: Analysing student data • Part 3: Consider teacher research • Higher Order Thinking • Collaborative Learning • YouTube Clip - “What Teachers Make” – Taylor Mali

3. Middle Schooling Pedagogies Pedagogy, in its simplest form, requires the teaching of some new practice or knowledge to learners (or the learning of something ‘out there’ by an individual or group) • Hickey-Moody, A. Savage, C. & Windle, J. (2010) There are six pedagogical processes that provide educators with conceptual understandings for discussing and reflecting upon their pedagogical practices. These six processes include; Researching, Designing, Communicating, Transforming, Performing & Reflecting.

4. Pedagogical Processes Activity: Each learning team will be given coloured post-it notes in which you must work collaboratively to brainstorm different teaching/classroom implications of each process outlined below. This activity will be a race to see which team can come up with the most valuable points under each of the six headings.

6. Activity: Virtual SchoolbagRefer to handouts- Part 1: Analysing the case study- Part 2: Analysing student data - Part 3: Considering Teacher Research

7. Higher Order Thinking • “Higher order thinking can be defined as the transformation of information and ideas in order to synthesise, generalise, explain, hypothesise or arrive at some conclusion or interpretation” (Queensland Implementation Unit, 2002). • Higher levels of thinking are distinguished from ordinary thoughts by the amount of control, exercise by the thinker and the degree of abstraction required. • Students must be taught higher order thinking skills so they become competent at handling information, can continually solve problems in a creative and collaborative way and can communicate these solutions. These skills will help students to respond appropriately and cope with rapid social change.

8. Using Higher Order Thinking Skills in the Classroom What are the ways in which we have used higher order thinking today? Some other examples may include: • Problem and performance based learning • Independent projects • Cooperative and collaborative learning • Curriculum integration / negotiation • Concept map • Tree diagrams • Flow charts

9. Collaborative Learning • “Classroom practices associated with individual representation, comparison, explanation, justification and validation are examined in order to explore how these practices allow collaborative activity to take place” (Pendergast & Bahr, 2010)

10. Using Collaborative Learning in the Classroom What are the ways in which we have used Collaborative Learning today? • Critique peer ideas • Share and compare ideas • Explain concepts • Discussions • Represent your group • Communicate and participate • Justify ideas and outcomes

11. YouTube Clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrKGmwhcOGg What Teachers Make- Taylor Mali