EDF4403 Session 1

I really enjoyed this session.
The main nugget that came out of the session for me was the discussion about the progression points and the fact that these are not the curriculum.
This was interesting for me for two reasons.
Firstly it related to discussions I have had with people previously about progression points and how students can be assessed against them. Deb’s point that if you teach to the progression points then it would be impossible allow for those students who had already grasped the main concept and were ready to move on, made it very clear to me the importance of the ‘curriculum continuum’ in relation to the progression points.
The second interesting point for me was how the concept of the progression points in VELS differs between subjects and how this difference could affect the way I teach.
The progression points in the mathematics domain seem to me to be a reasonable indicator of a students’ progress and would probably closely match the text books and the expected progression of learning. I can imagine it would be easy for a teacher used to using the progression points to drive teaching, to do the same in chemistry. Yet it is obvious that the progression points in the chemistry domain do not form a logical progression of chemistry learning (eg they seem to imply that learning content must come before learning context).
So the two most important ideas for my future learning were:
1) To be aware of the total curriculum in order to cater for all levels of learning in the classroom
2) Understand that my approach to one subject may need to be different to how I approach other subjects.

Since the start of this course I have always known that my chemistry content knowledge was weak. This was highlighted when going through the Chemistry Unit 1 and 2 textbook to find a topic to plan for our homework. The amount of extra content that is now in the curriculum is amazing and I am going to have to do some serious reading if I want to feel any sort of confidence in teaching any of this.

I don’t think I will ever be entirely comfortable with all the reflection stuff, but I think I probably was making it too complicated and trying too hard. I think if I just try to concentrate on the most importance pedagogical information that I get out of the sessions and explain why they were important and what I want to do with the information I might just get there.