EDF4403 Session3

Well firstly I have to reflect on the whole assessment marking stuff from session2.
Much of session2 was taken up with marking, and whether a numerical mark should be given for every assessment task or whether the focus should be on the feedback. I had come away willing to take all that on board and thinking that, as a teacher, I might try to wean the kids off the number and get them to concentrate more on the feedback and how they could improve.

However I recently got an assignment back with comments and essentially no mark...

Now the question I am asking myself is: what 'value' is the feedback. The teacher values feedback ( I know this) and is therefore more likely to put plenty in than the normal couple of words at the end. So is the feedback there to challenge me to think deeper, to push my boundaries that little bit more? Is the feedback there because I failed to cover important points or express myself clearly enough to the reader? Or is the feedback there simply to assure me - the writer - that my audience has indeed read the work and understood it.
My problem is that without a mark I have no idea. If it is the first scenario then presumably my work is of a high quality and the same level of thinking and research will get me a good mark next time. If its the second scenario then surely I need to know because I obviously need to improve. If its the last then the value of the feedback for all subsequent work is diminished and I still don't know whether my original output was of high quality, just acceptable or somewhere in between.

So I have sort of come back round to what was my original gut feel on the whole subject before the session 2 discussion - yes feedback is very important, but without that marking scale indication, it is very difficult to determine the quality of the work you produce.

Now on to session 3 - lab pracs.

Again the content knowledge evades me and my confidence in teaching anything other than general science to year 10 is shaken to the core. I am not the only one and at least I can get some sort of perverse reassurance from the fact that fellow students who are much more recently out of VCE or Bachelor courses are struggling with it too. Perhaps this is a sad indicator of the content knowledge of first year chemistry teachers... I hope not. I think there will be a hell of a lot of revision going on this summer!

I was quite surprised by Deb's comment (at least I think it was Deb) that kids don't really enjoy pracs. From the pracs I have taught or observed, the kids seem to enjoy getting some kit out, getting their hands dirty and actually doing something. Perhpas its the writing it up that takes the shine off.

I like the idea of some thinking questions at the start, however I am also aware of time constraints: if the prac is going to take 40 minutes, it would be unfair (and frustrating) to not allow enough time for the students to finish and double chem periods do not appear that often in timetables I have seen, and may not always coincide with the most approriate time to do a prac.

I desperately want to be able to implement some of the things we are learning into my lessons, but I feel there is something missing. I am not used to thinking or learning like this, and have not been 'taught' how to. I don't remember having lecture on how to plan an entire unit of work, how to be context based rather than content driven, how to make up interesting higher order thinking tasks around a topic. Yet this is what I am being asked to do. So I anguish over it, where to start, have I got enough context, does the question involve enough thinking? Will I get better over time - I certainly hope so.

Rather than increasing my learning I feel a bit like the holes in my learning are widening at the moment.

I will probably have more to add to this later...