According to the oxford dictionary entrepreneurship means “the activity of making money by starting or running businesses, especially when this involves taking financial risks”. I have also the common understanding that entrepreneurship is something related to trade, business idea, profit, financial risk etc. But when it comes to education entrepreneurship goes beyond this definition, meaning entrepreneurship in education refers to training for entrepreneurship, it’s a life-long learning process, it’s an ability of life management, interaction, self-guided action, a capacity for innovation and an ability to encounter change (Opetusministeriö, 2009).
But, the question is what is the significance of entrepreneurship education in teachers work? How can a teacher promote entrepreneurship education in his/her teaching?
The significance of entrepreneurship education can be better understood if we could clearly understand what is education? Education is a process of gaining and sharing knowledge with others, mainly at schools, but it does not mean that knowledge cannot be gained or shared beyond the school. Education gives an opportunity to a person to socialize, gain skills, and understand the values, moral and beliefs of the society. More than this education provides encouragement and confidence to accept the change in life. On the other hand entrepreneurship education is the process of empowering an individual with the ability to recognize business opportunity and knowledge and skills to take that business into practice (Jones & English, 2004). Through entrepreneurship education a teacher can guide a person in finding a better opportunity, commercializing a business, improves the risk taking ability, and so on. Thus it is reasonable to say that entrepreneurship education is a vital part of teacher’s work.
I have always been wondering how to incorporate entrepreneurship education in my teaching because every subject are different in terms of learning and teaching. When I look back to my teaching practice, the concept of entrepreneurship always has been an integral part of our education and learning. For example, in every courses we do assignments, do case studies, discuss with fellow friends and teachers to enhance our knowledge, invite speakers from industries to the class etc. The inclusion of these activities in teaching help student not only to boost their internal entrepreneurship but also to better understand their capability of external entrepreneurship (Lackéus, 2015). Here, internal entrepreneurship refers to feeling of being entrepreneur, act like an entrepreneur within the work organization, developing attitude, skills and knowledge needed for being an entrepreneur, and so on. Likewise, external entrepreneurship refers establishing a business, a courage of taking big decisions, accepting changes, and improvement in risk taking ability, and so on.
Also the research has shown the link between entrepreneurship education and student’s attitudes towards entrepreneurship (Von Graevenitz, Harhoff, & Weber, 2010). A research by Kusumojanto, Narmaditya, & Wibowo, (2020) also found similar results, however, in their research they also found that entrepreneurial attitude does not influence on students’ entrepreneurial intentions. On the other hand Ahmed, Chandran, Klobas, Liñán, & Kokkalis, (2020) claim that a positive experience during entrepreneurship education have a positive intentions on students to start their own business. These informations can be very useful for not only policy makers but also to teachers in planning their materials for teaching. For example, in our teaching we can provide guidelines for further study in the subject matter, also we can incorporate more practical examples and case studies, invite speaker from industries, etc. In addition to this by incorporating entrepreneurship education in teaching a teacher can practice student centered approach in teaching (Jones & English, 2004). Furthermore, a teacher can help students by connecting them with industry players, business managers, and help students in building a network for their better future. I do believe that teachers are socially responsible person, meaning it is the duty and responsibility of a teacher to develop better learning environment, teach student to be good and responsible citizen, teacher should promote social and moral values through teaching, prepare students for future challenges, encourage students for life-long learning. A teacher can influence a student and society in many different ways. Thus, it is reasonable to say entrepreneurship education is highly significant in teachers work.
In spite of growing trend in incorporating entrepreneurship education in curriculum and program there remains some challenges, for example, entrepreneurship is a changing process, with the passage and experience of people, ides changes, concept changes, way of thinking and working changes (Kuratko, 2005). At the same time society, jobs and working life are also changing continuously, which demand new knowledge and skills on continuous basis (Opetusministeriö, 2009). This means that a teacher should be always creative and open to develop and revise the course content and should try new ways of implementation.
In conclusion, I can say that one of the key aspects of entrepreneurship education to promote entrepreneurial activities among students and encourage them to accept changes occurring in their life and promote life-long learning. As a teacher we need to understand that entrepreneurship is more than creation of business.
List of reference
Ahmed, T., Chandran, V. G. R., Klobas, J. E., Liñán, F., & Kokkalis, P. (2020). Entrepreneurship education programmes: How learning, inspiration and resources affect intentions for new venture creation in a developing economy. The International Journal of Management Education, 18(1), 100327.
Jones, C., & English, J. (2004). A contemporary approach to entrepreneurship education. Education+ training.
Kuratko, D. F. (2005). The emergence of entrepreneurship education: Development, trends, and challenges. Entrepreneurship theory and practice, 29(5), 577-597.
Kusumojanto, D. D., Narmaditya, B. S., & Wibowo, A. (2020). Does entrepreneurial education drive students’ being entrepreneurs? Evidence from Indonesia. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 8(2), 454.
Von Graevenitz, G., Harhoff, D., & Weber, R. (2010). The effects of entrepreneurship education. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 76(1), 90-112.
I completed my teaching practice at the department of Industrial management, University of Vaasa, during the period of 26.10.2020 – 4.12.2020. During my teaching practice, I taught the course “introduction to production management” for bachelor’s level students. The course was also open to exchange students and master’s students from the department of industrial management, who needs to complete complementary studies.
In this blogpost, I will try to reflect on my teaching practice; specifically I will answer few key questions related to my teaching practice, for example,
How did I prepared the teaching materials and assessment criteria?
What was good during my teaching practice?
What went bad?
What did I learned?
What different I would have done during my teaching practice?
In addition, I will bring few feedbacks (both positive and negative) that I received from the students participating the course. Finally, I will conclude this blogpost with my plan for continuous development as a professional teacher.
How did I prepared the teaching materials and assessment criteria?
In response to this question, I would like to start with my teaching philosophy. My teaching practice is a mixture of two pedagogical approach: behaviorism and constructivism. Behaviorism in a sense that I am actively delivering lectures (based on lecture theme supported by teaching materials i.e. power point slides) and constructivism in a sense that student actively needs to take part in actual task, for example numerical calculation and short discussion.
Personally, I believe that teaching and learning experience can be enhanced, if we could change our roles frequently during teaching. In other words, sometimes the teacher is taking the main role and sometimes the students. At the same time, I also believe that each individual has own way of learning, for example, some students learn better by listening to lectures, some learn better by seeing pictures and diagrams while some students learn better through self-study. This is the reason why I follow both behaviorism and constructivism approach in developing the teaching materials. In other words, my teaching material meets the needs of different students, for example, the material is suitable for contact teaching and online teaching. In addition, the materials can be used for self-study, each lecture slides are developed in logical and coherence manner with maximum possible information on the topic. Specifically, when we consider the current time (considering covid-19), the relevance of multipurpose teaching material is very convenient, where both teacher and students are struggling for teaching and learning. I have considered these issues in developing the teaching materials.
I have given two possibility for students to complete the course: Alternative I and II. In alternative I, students have the access to all the teaching materials, do self-study, and take the exam when they are ready. In alternative II, student participate in online teaching, practice exercise, complete the assignments, and finally take the exam.
Key features of my lessons are visual teaching, meaning in my teaching I use power point slides, pictures, and diagrams to explain different concepts, for example. I also use video clips related to the topic under discussion, for example from YouTube. Furthermore, during my teaching I always asks open questions and ask students to take part in discussion. I use all these resources not only to support my teaching, but also to enhancing student’s learning experience.
Similarly, the learning environment can be developed within the scope of classroom or virtual setting. Classroom environment means the traditional way of teaching and learning, where the teacher and student have face-to-face meeting. On the other hand virtual setting means the way of teaching and learning by means of internet, in case of virtual setting students and teacher are connected by means of digital tools, for example, skype, zoom, adobe connect etc. It can be in real time or the as and when needed (different sessions are recorded and can be accessed when needed or at one’s own convenience).
Key steps that I followed in preparing teaching materials
Curriculum (provided by university administration)
Syllabus (it’s my work)
Teaching materials (it’s my work)
Assessment criteria and course evaluation (it’s my work)
Lesson plan (it’s my work)
Based on the curriculum provided by the university, I prepared the course syllabus, teaching materials, course implementation plan, assessment criteria and course evaluation, and finally the lesson plan was developed. In order to develop teaching materials I followed above mentioned tasks in a series. To facilitate students learning, Moodle page for the course was developed, where all the teaching materials, course syllabus, implementation plan etc. were available to the course participants.
The development of teaching materials was a bit easy because the course “introduction to production management” comes within my domain of knowledge. I have bachelors of engineering to PhD in industrial management. However, as I was developing the teaching materials, I struggle with time and resources; especially I face challenges to meet the needs of different student’s background, previous knowledge and learning ability. I spent a lot of time in thinking and developing the teaching materials. During the process of developing teaching materials, I realized that lesson planning and developing of teaching materials is one of the most important, crucial, and time consuming. I might have experienced this because I was developing the teaching material and lesson plan independently in my own and for the first time. I hope that by the passage of time I will have different experience.
Assessment criteria
The course contained two sessions for each topic (the course was divided into six different topics), first the normal lecture followed by exercise session. Both lecture and exercise sessions were carried out online through Zoom. During the normal lectures, we talk about the theory within the scope of lecture topic. During the exercise session, we solve the numerical problems related to the lecture themes. In practice, I teach the students how to do different calculations related to production management. Meaning, first I open the numerical questions, ask the students to read it, if there is any difficulties to understand the question I explain them clearly: What information is available in the question and what values needs to be calculated? After this, I give some time to students to do the actual calculation and ask them to send me the answers in the chat box (privately), the exercise sessions were held online. At the end, I demonstrated the solution and explain how the calculation is done, and what does those numbers and calculations means in practice.
At the end students are supposed to submit their calculations, from this student can earn one points for final course evaluation. This extra one point was given not only for course assessment but also to keep students motivation to learn new things throughout the course. Furthermore, students were asked to answer theoretical questions as an assignment after each lecture. However, the assignment following lecture sessions were not the part of course evaluation.
Besides this there was an exam consisting of two parts: Numerical calculations and theory exam. In the exam, students get six different numerical questions, out of which they have to solve five questions. Similarly, in the theory exam, there was two questions, one question with six short questions (out of which student needs to answer four questions) and two essay type questions (out of which student needs to answer one question).
The course was evaluated in the scale of 0 – 5, 0 means fail and 5 means excellent. In order to get excellent grade the student should demonstrate that he/she has good understanding of the course literature and theory, numerical calculation and can apply know-how in practice.
Thus, the assessment criteria was balanced considering numerical calculation, theory, course objective and learning goals.
Either it is guiding students for teaching or doing assessment for grading I do always maintain transparency, for example, I always provide students with clear instruction what they can do and what they cannot do in completing the course. Students have access to all the teaching materials through Moodle. If student do not follow plagiarism guideline in completing the assignments or project work, either they need to re do the task or fail the course. Similarly, students receive clear idea about the criteria for course evaluation at the beginning of the course. If the student is not satisfied with the evaluation, he or she has the right to know how the marking and evaluations has been done. If there come some sort of misunderstanding, the issue is forwarded to administration and the student’s performance will be evaluated by third person, if necessary. Even during my teaching practice one student was willing to go through own exam papers and wanted to know how the markings and evaluations have been made. I was very happy to go through the exam papers with the student.
What went good during my teaching?
24 hours was allocated for contact teaching, 12 hours of lectures and 12 hours of exercise sessions. During my teaching, I tried my best to maintain two-way communication through discussion questions and asking open questions to the students in between the lectures. Students also had an opportunity to ask questions whenever they want. In practice, it was a bit difficult to maintain two-way communication because students do not like to speak. This is quite common in Finland people like to listen rather than speaking, they speak when there is real need to speak; this is what I have experienced. On the other hand, it was a bit different during exercise sessions; students were a bit more open. However, I was confident enough to content, teaching materials and my presentation.
From the pedagogical point of view, I practiced mixed method (behaviorism and constructivism) during the actual teaching and during exercise session, my approach was activity based learning. It was a nice experience to see how student-centered approach and teacher-centered approach work in practice.
What went bad during my teaching?
Each lessons (both lectures and exercise sessions) was planned for 2 hours. Everything worked as planned; I did not experienced any surprises. In some lessons, it was a bit difficult to cover all the materials within two hours of teaching. However, I managed without breaks in the middle but with the permission of students. In some part of teaching, I was too much in the topic and in some part; I was at very surface level. When I look back to my teaching practice, time management during the lecture hours was a bit poor. In many circumstances, during lecture hours, I had difficulties in maintaining two-way communication; very few students were willing to speak. In addition, in some cases I am not satisfied with my presentation skills.
Feedback and comments from the students
Once the course is over students were asked to give feedback for the course. The feedback was collected through Weeboodi anonymously. Following are the key highlights from student feedback to the course.
Question 1. The course objectives and contents are planned so that 1 credit point corresponds to about 27 hours of student work, including both contact teaching and the student’s independent work. Evaluate the total amount of work that you need to complete the course and, based on that, evaluate if the workload of the course in relation to its credit points is:
Question 2.
Questions
Average score
Overall grade for the course: 1 (weak) – 5 (excellent)
4.0
Course contents corresponded the intended learning outcomes set for the course: 1 (did not correspond) – 5 (corresponded fully)
4.0
I took responsibility for my own learning: 1 (scarcely at all) – 5 (full responsibility)
5.0
I participated actively in the course learning experience (eg. lectures, online assignments, using the material given for the course): 1 (scarcely at all) – 5 (participated fully)
4.0
Question 3.Which factors promoted your learning, what went well?
Lectures and exercise sessions promoted my learning.
Exercise and the ability of lecturer to deliver the information.
Good material in the course and wide field of task and good course book and it was well available.
Also easy to understand and in numerical exercise lectures there were well time and aid to figure out what was happening and why.
It is a really interesting course fulfil of useful information, but I would say that it’s a problem if you have the same class with other courses.
Question 4.How would you suggest developing the course in the future?
Few video presentation and lecture was not recorded.
The course is perfect enough.
I would like to suggest recording the classes or lectures next year if the situation continues because some students could have the problem of having the same subject as others at the same time.
I was happy with it but more do it on your own time tasks with solutions maybe?
When I see the feedback and comments from students, I feel that the course implementation was good. However, there are many things that I would have done differently or have to improve for the future.
What did I learned from my teaching practice?
Before going for actual teaching practice, we had gone through several online teaching sessions as a mandatory part of professional teacher education programme at Oulu University of Applied Sciences. My active participation in all of these sessions helped me a lot not only in preparing for teaching practice but also for actual teaching practice. Key things that I learned during the practice teaching sessions at OAMK are
How to develop teaching material and assessment criteria?
How to do course assessment?
How to handle time management issues during lecture hours?
How to maintain two-way communication during teaching?
How to address the need of students (considering special need, background etc.)?
And few more.
During my actual teaching practice, I experienced myself how all these things (above-mentioned questions) happens in practice. I have practical experience of teaching: before teaching (preparation tasks) and after teaching (course assessment, student feedback and comments). Furthermore, during my teaching practice I noticed few key things, for example,
Students are more open (for discussion and even for asking questions) in small group in comparison to large group.
Lesson planning and real implementation are not the same, how well we have planned there comes some challenges during the real implementation.
In the similar manner from my teaching practice I also learned
to consider students different needs in developing course syllabus or teaching materials or exam. For example, I prepare teaching materials with written supportive documents considering students with busy schedule i.e. work and study, some students prefer to read themselves than coming to regular lecture. At the same time I have also provided an opportunity for the students to take the exam in different dates considering their special need, for example medical reason, military service etc.
to acknowledge the student’s individuality and the need for support. For example, during my teaching practice few students emailed me that they had difficulties in understanding the topic under discussion. To support these students’ needs I arranged extra lessons other than planned lectures and exercise sessions. During the extra session I tried to understand the reason behind their challenges (e.g. previous background, medical reason, and difficulties with numerical calculations) and I have considered these issues in doing course assessment. In some cases I have provided additional exercise and tasks to promote student’s learning.
to teach, guide, and assess, the student’s physical, psychical and social safety in mind. For example, I always keep my eyes open while students are having group discussions and make comments to peers. Whenever, I notice something I just interrupt the discussion and make the environment normal. In my teaching I am always try to be friendly, respect my students and the class room environment. In my teaching I always mention that co-operation helps a lot to enhance our learning experience. I am also aware of student’s well-being, safety guidelines provided by the university, there might be someone in the class who needs special attention because of physical or psychological needs, for example.
to plan teaching and guiding the student’s physical, psychical and social safety in mind. I believe that every person is different and needs some kind of good feelings to promote learning. For example in implementing of my teaching I always try my best not to hurt students physically, psychologically. I always try my best to create a social and friendly environment in the class room whether it is online teaching or contact teaching.
The most important lesson I learned was that we should look for improvement. As a conclusion to this blogpost, I will talk about my continuous learning plan as a professional teacher. Anyway my teaching practice was a nice experience.
What different I would have done during my teaching practice?
Maybe I would have used some recorded video, which might have given a better learning experience to students because they can follow the lecture whenever they want and as many times as they want. There was similar feedback from one the course participant that if the situation (Covid-19) continues he/she recommends producing the recording of the lectures.
I might have practiced flip learning, at least in the first lecture. This is because of the fact that in my teaching, I noticed that some students were facing challenges to understand different terms used this maybe because of the fact that not every student have same background. Maybe, in the future this can be avoided with pre-reading material and assignment before the actual implementation of teaching. Furthermore, it might help me to maintain better two-way communication throughout the course implementation.
Based on the feedback from students, I might have given a bit longer time in completing numerical exercise. In the feedback, one student mentioned, “I was happy with it but more do it on your own time tasks with solutions maybe”. Maybe I have to provide a bit more time for students to complete the numerical exercise.
The assignments following the lectures were optional, maybe in the future I would like to make it mandatory task to pass the course. Instead of optional assignment, mandatory assignment might help students to have a better learning experience. In an informational discussion one of my student mentioned that it would have motivated him to learn better if the assignments after were mandatory.
Based on my experience, I can say that lesson planning and real implementation are not the same, how well we have planned there comes some challenges during the real implementation, for example time management, previous knowledge and background of students (every time student groups are different). However, I believe that for sure proper planning and experience will help to overcome these challenges.
How I have planned to develop continuously as a professional teacher?
Continues development is a constructive philosophy, meaning a person’s understanding and views is not stable it changes with time, experience, and knowledge. This idea is applicable to teachers as well. Thus, to keep up with the needs of current and future students, a teacher should keep on learning continuously.
In the past few decades, the way of teaching and learning has been changed a lot, while I was at high school the way of learning was different from what is happening now. Now students have access to different sources of knowledge and the availability and use of internet has changed our way of learning. Looking at the current situation of education, Covid-19 has really revolutionized current teaching practice throughout the world. The digital competence is must for future teaching. Therefore, as a teacher we should be always open to new knowledge not only on the subject matter but also to new development in teaching and learning style. Furthermore, the continuous and professional development helps a teacher to develop a better learning environment. Therefore, to keep me up dated as a professional teacher I would actively do the following.
Keep on learning, both the areas of my teaching and development in teaching and learning style. This will help me to keep up-to-date with new development in teaching and facilitating learning.
Take part in teacher exchange programme. This will help to develop network and to understand different approach of teaching in other culture and community.
Take part in continuous development courses, workshop and training for teachers. This will help in developing new knowledge and skills to better facilitate the student’s learning.
Collect and document feedback from student. This will help to evaluate the adopted teaching method, provides reason for improvement, helps to develop and improve teaching methods, and keeps on motivating to learn new things.
Be familiar with the changes in public policy and laws especially policy and laws related to education. This will help to accommodate changes in course content and curriculum.
Follow leading international journal in teacher’s education, learning and development. Few leading journals that I have planned to follow are
On 17th December 2019, we discussed about the special needs education. The special needs education refers to the educational environment that are designed to meet the needs of students with disabilities in learning. During today’s discussion we covered the following three topics.
Special needs education: supporting the students
Students welfare
Special education (inclusion, accessibility, and learning environment)
What happened during lesson planning, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
Like previous session we had clear plan for preparing the teaching materials. Every group member came up with own findings but as usual only few members were active in preparing the teaching materials. Me and one of the other team member did not agreed with the quality of the materials, I suggested slightly different materials (but including each team members materials) with proper referencing to my part and asked other team members to do go through the PowerPoint slides and ask them to add reference to their part. I also asked them to make changes, if they feel that there is need for change. Till then everything was fine. The final slides that were suggested by other members had few issues like, plagiarism, also the content of the few slides were not relevant. Me and one of the team member raised this issue in front of the other team members. There was strong comment from one of the team member saying that if anybody does not agree with the final slides can go for their own. This was the reason me and one of the other team member decided to come up with slightly different teaching materials than rest of the group.
I noticed that our cultural background and the personal circumstances have significant impact in the quality of work we do. Besides few bad experiences, I enjoyed the lesson planning. During the lesson planning I learned the following things:
I had as assumption that inclusion means being included in a group or environment. When it comes with education the meaning of inclusion goes wider. In education inclusion means structuring of the school, classroom and lessons so that different set (including students with learning disabilities) of students can learn and participate together. This was new information to me.
True inclusion means removal of all barriers, discrimination and intolerance. There should be a feeling of welcome to students.
I knew from before that the Finnish education is one of the best education system in the world, but did not had the idea of how well inclusion has been implemented and practiced in Finnish education system. It was really great to know students are provided with special support, if needed students can have access to special educational task, special education and training, and even special education plan.
I understood the actual meaning of pedagogy i.e. pedagogy refers to all the activities that a teacher does in order to enhance the learning experience of a student. All activities carried by a teacher needs to be justified in terms of what to do, how to do, why to do, and when to do.
Most importantly, I learned the strategies to develop pedagogically accessible learning environment, which are described in following five points:
First, strategy to create accessible learning environment is to develop and maintain proper channel of communication with the students. This allows a teacher three key benefits, first the communication helps a teacher to listen the voice of the students i.e. what actually they want. Second it helps a teacher to consider students perspectives in teaching and learning, and finally proper communication helps to increase student’s participation in learning. The communication can be maintained by using different tools and means, for example, face to face communication or virtual communication.
Second, strategy is to maintain physical spaces that is accessible to different set of students, for example the students set could be children, young, adult or physically handicapped. As a teacher, we should respect the students psychology and should be able to development some sort of attachment, so that both students and teacher feel comfortable to the learning environment. Here, student’s psychology refers to the individual students learning ability (disability), outcomes, how a student react to new set of information and so on. All these factors needs to take into consideration while teaching and learning.
Third, strategy is to use appropriate course materials compatible for different learning styles, for example reading, listening, and visual. This is simply because of the fact that each and every students have different approach for learning. Some prefer reading materials, some prefer audio materials i.e. to listening, and others prefer visual materials for learning.
Fourth, strategy is to maintain the classroom environment in such a way that every students could have the feeling of welcoming to the class.
Finally, the fifth strategy is to encourage outdoor learning. Here, outdoor learning refers to extended learning that goes beyond the scope of classroom learning. For example, experiments, excursion, company visit, internships, discussing with friends and family, and so on.
What happened during online teaching session, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
In-spite of some bad experience during lesson planning, I was excited for the teaching session. Maybe the excitement was because this was the last teaching session before Christmas and New Year holidays, also the last session before we go for teaching practices. Me and Sanna started the teaching session. Sanna was leading the first part of the session which contained a bit more information than usual, with almost non interactive question. I was leading the second part which had interactive questions after almost every slides. While preparing the teaching materials we did not noticed but while practicing the lecture I felt that we would have made the balance between theoretical information and the interactive question right from the beginning. Otherwise, the session was OK, the session might have been different. After the session I feel like I get a bit more excited and forget to mention important information that I had planned originally. Maybe in the future I need to go for practicing lesion before the actual session, not only planning.
The second session was led by a Davies, he was talking about how can we support or meet the needs of students who are in need of special support.
During this session I learned two specific things, first, I learned to identify person with special need we need to notice personal behavior of the students, for example, illness, disability, potential risk in learning (there is no problem at the moment but there might be in the future), and so on. Second, I learned to address the special needs of the students, to support the students with special support, we need to interact with them, consider proper pedagogical approach in teaching and learning considering each and every student, we should consider the students’ abilities for learning from lesson planning to assessment.
Also, there was few videos from YouTube that we went through, those videos were very sentimental, heart touching, could not talk and think for few moments. After seeing the video, I feel like teacher have very strong role in shaping peoples life and the future. I don’t remember in which video but the sentence “A single moment of time can change people’s life” was very powerful and the message was clearly towards the role of the teacher.
The third session was led by Imran, he was talking about student’s welfare in school and universities in general. This session was also very interesting, during this session I learned how to deal if is a problem with the students. First, we need to understand the context i.e. why there is a problem, once we know the problem we can direct the students to student social welfare. Students and parents of small children can contact the student social welfare unit at the school and university to discuss about the problem, even without knowing the reason behind the problem.
During, the discussion Imran shared his own experience how one of his student changed his behavior just with simple behavior shown by him i.e. patience. From this story I learned that as a teacher we should always give student proper reactive time, let them think, let them to take time, this could be a good motivation for many students to speak something.
During the entire session, I did not noticed anything bad. In my opinion everything went fine.
What were the key findings in your group’s discussion? What observations did you make comparing your results to the other groups’ discussion?
Key findings:
Identification of problems in earl stage could be a milestone in enhancing the student’s ability in learning.
The context is very important in understanding and overcoming the student’s problem.
There is nothing wrong to use the facility from student welfare office. We should not feel shy, as a teacher we should always encourage our students to speak out their problems.
A teacher can change a student’s life within a second, if reacted to the student problem wisely.
Patience is very important characteristics for a teacher.
Comparing your results to the other groups’ discussion:
Each and every teams had a different topic, but within the same theme i.e. special needs education. Therefore, there was bot similarities and difference in the context and the overall discussion. However, I noticed that in each of the session we were discussing that it’s good to consider individual characteristics of every student, but I wonder how it might be possible within one group when there is huge diversity within the members of the group. Even it was difficult for us to co-operate within our group members several times, maybe it’s because of cultural difference.
On 3rd of December 2019, we discussed about competence in working like and network. As usual different teams prepared teaching materials in different topic but within the same theme i.e. competence in working life and networks. The different topic we covered were as follows:
Competence in working life and networks
Networking must for vocational/professional teacher
Introduction to social network theory
What happened during lesson planning, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
During the lesson planning, we had a bit different experience than the previous session. The main difference was in the presentation layout, every team member came up with own findings and ideas. One of the team member combined all the materials together as a final presentation documents, but me and one other team member feel like it was not enough i.e. we feel like it needs a lot of modifications and changes both in terms of content and the text. I did prepared the new materials (but I respected all the team members work and tried to incorporate as much as possible) and asked other team members to comment on it, we had a bit conflict in finalizing the teaching materials. Me and one of our team member disagreed and decided to follow the modified version of the presentation, which was uploaded to group folder in Dropbox for comments, but somebody deleted the file (we don’t know the reason why?). However, we were able to find the original file.
Good thing was that we discussed a lot but bad this was that we could not reach to one conclusion.
During the lesson planning I learned that being flexible doesn’t work always. We need to take strong decision and move forward, but it does not mean that disrespecting others. Furthermore, during the lesson planning, I learned about the relevance of network theory in teaching and learning. The idea of human biology and behavior was also new to me. I knew that the human biology has some impact in our behavior but I was not aware of Sigmund Freud theory of human mind. I learned that our mind works in three states i.e. preconsciously, consciously, and unconsciously. As a teacher, we always needs to support our students to have conscious state of mind while teaching and learning. This concept will be very useful in my future teaching and learning.
About the pre-task
I enjoyed the pre-task, the task was not difficult but when they asked to prepare a video, then it took me to think, what to speak and what to not…..this led me to the decision that better to speak straight during the presentation rather than making a video (also, there was this possibility given). However, I felt like I am preparing for interview…some sort of different feeling and experience but in a positive way. Maybe this short experience will be useful in the future when there is need for making a video presentation of teaching materials for online teaching.
What happened during online teaching session, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
During the online teaching session, for the first time I can across technical issues few times during our presentation I was kicked out by the system. I could not understand why, but from this I learned that I need to have some sort of backup plan for the future. Good thing was that we had nice discussion, we enjoyed the pre-task. I learned that how useful it can be the guest lecture…..it gave me some kind of excitement and I felt the same from other members. From this I learned that the practice of guest lecture will give nice feelings to the participants. On the other hand, I noticed a bit slow presentation from other teams, for example team TREE’s material was bit different than usual, they had almost no question for discussion in comparison to previous session.
In the last session, we had issue with time management, so this time we planned ahead the presentation who is going to speak which topic. This helped to overcome the problem of time management. I learned that team co-ordination and pre-planning is very important in delivering a presentation/lecture.
My personal networks
I don’t have account in social network sites, but I have LinkedIn account which I don’t use much, maybe once in a months or two. However, I would like to be connected with the people within my field, they can be from industry or the academia. I believe that networking might help me in many aspects, for example, to collaborate with companies in my teaching, doing joint research, and to move forward in positive direction (I mean what the people think and do within my field of education, and so on). Furthermore, we can work on joint research, organize visiting lecture, seminars and so on.
I don’t have much networking experience, but I look forward to be connected with my class mates, students, faculty members, and so on. In the past I have participated in couple of international conference but no new contacts. In the future I look forward to visit conference both within Finland and outside and try to build contacts with people within my field of education.
Pros and cons of social media in teaching and learning.
Personally, I am not fan of social media because I feel like it gives more psychological stress than the people think….I have seen people (both teacher and students) exploring their social sites (e.g. Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, etc. ) even during important discussion. I feel like these days social sites has become some sort of addiction, which needs to be addressed in personal level. Furthermore, if the person does not have strong ability for analytical and critical thinking, then there is huge possibility that he/she can easily become the victim of fake information. On the other hands, there is also good aspects of social sites in teaching and learning, for example, students and teacher can have common plate form to share their views in the topic, teaching and learning materials, and so on. However, there must be some sort of own schedule and priority to use these social sites i.e. when to use, why to use. Maybe people should be able to make a difference between good practice and bad practice of social networking sites.
On 19th November 2019, we
had online teaching session, the theme of the day was international and
multicultural competence. Three teams prepared their teaching material in three
different topics but within the scope of international and multicultural
competence in teaching and learning. The different topics that we discussed
were as follows:
Design and deliver an interactive learning situation in multicultural teaching and learning environment.
Internationalization in vocational education, and
International and multicultural competence.
What happened during lesson planning,
what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
Our team tried to find the information
about designing and delivering interactive learning situation in multicultural
teaching and learning environment. Also we paid attention to find the answer to
the question what are the most important multicultural competencies for teaching and
learning.
This time I was coordinating the task,
to make it uniformity I developed 11 different questions within our topic and
asked my team members to answer the questions. Also I prepared a sample
PowerPoint slide and asked team members to make comments and make changes if
needed. For first time the assigned task seems to be easy, but in fact I feel
like it was one of the most difficult task, there were similar opinion from
other team members as well. However, the final teaching materials was really
good. Each team members were highly satisfied with the material that we
produced.
During the planning I learned that the
proper planning makes task to be interesting not only to complete the task on
time but also the final product to be of high quality. As usual we had some
problem in team coordination, communication, maybe it’s a part of cultural
difference or different understanding about the task. My experience in working
in a team of multicultural group made me to think that multicultural competence
is a must have competence to be a good teacher. It helps in many perspectives,
for example, time management, development of teaching materials, communication,
and so on. I also learned that the rules of the game needs to be a bit strict,
especially in case of working in a multicultural environment.
During the lesson planning I paid good
attention to develop interactive situation. I learned how to design and deliver
interactive learning situations without the use of digital technology. Similarly,
I learned that good listening
skills, open-minded and intercultural communicationskills are the most
important competencies for a teacher to promote effective/efficient teaching
and learning in multicultural group.I learned that to initiate a better
interactive situation, it’s always good to focus on student questions i.e. the
question asked by student. Also, I
realized my direction to be a good teacher, for example I need to understand
the class dynamics, it helps me in better lesson planning and implementation.
However, creation of comfortable classroom environment is the key to have
better experience of teaching and learning.
What happened during online teaching
session, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
During the lesson planning we had discussed and planned within our team member that we will keep our presentation to be the last one. In practice as we followed the same (but some of our team member did it differently). The reason for this was we had assumption that all the teaching materials will be overlapping each other, our expectation was right. First group discussed about, internationalization in vocational education, and the second group talked about international and multicultural competence. When I saw the title of the presentation from the second group it was exactly the same as we planned for our group, but at the last moment we changed the title of our presentation.
During the first presentation I learned few things, for example, the teacher roles increases if we use debate as an interaction tool in the class room, there is possibility that the student may take it personally. In the similar manner I learned that maybe through internationalization we might have better quality, equality, and creativity in our teaching and learning. Finally, I learned that use of language skills is very important in multicultural teaching and learning. There was similar conclusion from second group and our group as well, for example both the group concluded that the use of language/ intercultural communication skills is very important for a teacher.
Second team talked about theories related to international and multicultural competence, for example, interaction theory, simulation theory, and multicultural theory. I was not familiar with these theories. This was something new what I learned, but somehow interaction can be correlated with interaction approach that our team came up with i.e. interaction between student and student, interaction between student and teacher, and the interaction between student, teacher and student.
Finally, we made our presentation, other teams appreciated our materials. At some point they were really surprised, for example, our observation on one of the previous session on developing interactive situation i.e. how different teams followed different approach in designing and delivering lessons. I have already discussed about these approaches in my earlier blog entitled Laws and Amendments.
Individual task
I don’t have much international/multicultural
experience. On the other hand I am from Nepal, studied and worked in Finland.
This means I have some international experience, here I will describe my
personal experience in Finland. I studies in international program and after
completing my studies I started to work as a teacher in international program.
From my experience it’s a bit different to be a student and to be a teacher, I
feel like I have more responsibilities as a teacher. From my experience I can
say that working in a multicultural teaching and learning environment, we need
to have more structured plan, for example If I ask my students to find
information on some topic than there is possibilities that international
students are not familiar with the information retrieval skills. As a teacher
in multicultural group I need to be prepared to teach them more than the course
content, for example, information retrieval skills, plagiarism, source
citation, identifying reliable sources, and so on. Also, during the journey of
teachers education working in multicultural team I have experienced that we
need a bit more energy and needs to keep on knocking other team members to
complete their task.
Similarly, I had opportunity to
visit some international conferences, which gave me different experience but in
a good way, for example, I could see how the people around the world are
thinking and doing within my field of education. At the same time it helped me
to develop network. I think this network for sure will help me to know more
about my field of education, which in turn impact my teaching and learning
experience.
I would like to express my
understanding to multiculturalism and internationalism on the basis of my
personal experience. For example, my research work at the university is
internationalism because our research focuses more on global issues, we try to
understand the difference in working culture from two different country. On the
other hand, when I see the entire Finnish community, it comprises of both
Finnish and Swedish culture (also the international community is increasing),
this is what I see as multiculturalism i.e. it’s all about ethnicity and race.
Maybe it’s better to say that my short term visit (e.g. participation in international conference) to other countries is internationalism but my adoption Finnish community is multiculturalism, trying to integrate with Finnish society which is already multiculturalism (mixture of Finnish and Swedish culture).
Group task: My opinion on our
group members teaching session in different rooms.
When I went through the different
teaching session conducted my by team members, I had mixed opinion (both good and bad) about
different teaching session, which I have tried to explain the following tables:
Was the delivery
similar?
To answer this question I should say both yes and no. Yes in the sense that every team member used the same teaching materials and no in the sense that there was noticeable difference in delivering the lecture.
What kinds of differences were there?
Had all the members’ understood the task in the same way?
The following is the sample lesson plan for the topic “design thinking in service design” under the course service design. The lesson is planned for two hour including 15 minutes break in the middle.
Today we had online session, as usual
three different teams were asked to prepare the teaching materials on different
topics. The different topics that we discussed were as follows:
Current research,
development, and innovation (RDI) in own field of education
Teacher’s RDI skills
Research on research (finding
research community, suitable journals for publication, and so on)
What happened during lesson planning,
what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
This time our team prepared teaching
materials on the topic current RDI trends in our field of education.
Specifically, we tried to find the information to following three questions:
What are the current RDI trends in our field of
education?
Where can one find information about them? And
How do Finnish universities and universities of
applied science benefits from the publication written by their teachers?
Like the previous assignment our team
followed predefined group matrix, in the group matrix we define who does what
and how the final work will be combined. I actively participated in literature
search, power point presentation, and also in making final review of the
teaching materials. This time our team decided to conduct the teaching session
a bit differently than the previous session. Therefore, we developed a pre-task
for other team members through Padlet. The knowledge of Padlet was new to me, I
had heard about it but never used in practice. Now, I know the use of Padlet in teaching, in
the future, whenever there is possibilities I will use it in my teaching and
learning. Our decision of doing something different was really good, this gave
me an opportunity to learn about Padlet.
I did not noticed anything went
bad, but I wish there could be more contribution from team members.
From my previous experience I was a
bit familiar with the current research trend in my field of education i.e.
operations management. Also I am a bit familiar with reach practices of Finnish
universities. In this sense the topic was not new to me. However, I had never
went through the official documents or followed the view point of RDI practices
by Finnish universities. When I came across the RDI practices of Oulu
University of Applied Sciences (OUAS) and the Oulu University (OU), I learned
new things, for example, that RDI trends in OUAS is mainly concerned
with regional and local development while RDI trends in OU is mainly concerned
with global challenges. I learned that the priority of university of applied
sciences and the university are different, even though I am a former student of
university of applied sciences, I was not aware of this facts before or I had
not realized it. Maybe this information will help me in my future career as
teacher, for example, in the future I can decide which direction I want to
shape my research i.e. on the regional and local issues or on the global
issues. Now I know depending on my priorities I can choose which university to choose
from. However, I also understand that these are not the abstract things i.e.
the research priorities can be in either side from both type of universities.
What happened during online teaching
session, what went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
Today’s online session was very
interesting, every team presented their findings. First session was led by a
member from OWL. During the first session we discussed about university
teachers RDI skills, the use of Flinga.fi was really interesting, I was not
aware of this site before. I found it to be a handy tool for group work, both
for online and contact teaching. Second session was led by our team BASTU, we
discussed about current RDI trend in our own field of education, and we
presented our experience with the other participants. They appreciated the
information we shared. Finally, a team member from TREE presented their view on
research on research. This session was almost like the summary to previous
sessions. We did not planned but fortunately the sequence of session was really
interesting i.e. first team talked about teachers RDI skills, second team
talked about current RDI trends in own field of education, and finally the last
team presented research on research (finding research community, suitable
journals for publication, and so on). As I am involved in research work, I knew
most of the things beforehand. However, it was a good revision for me.
During the session, we had some
technical issues, sometimes the sound quality was not good, but in general it
went fine.
I learned that, as a teacher RDI
activities is very important, as it keeps us updated i.e. what is going within
the field of our education. So that we can have better teaching and learning
working experience. I keep on doing research as a life learning process.
Individual task
During the
online teaching session we cited examples from Oulu University of Applied
Science and the Oulu University. I came to know that University of applied
sciences (UAS), in general, focuses on RDI activities related to local and
regional issues, while universities focuses on RDI activities related to global
community. This was something new to me, I had assumption that both type of
universities has similar research priorities, but now things are a bit clear.
However, it does not mean that UAS cannot focus on global issues and
vice-versa, I can say this is from my experience at UAS (as a student) and
University (both as student and employee).
Regarding
the time that a teacher can spend in RDI activities depends on the role of an
individual person. Some of the staff members are working as a full time
researcher and some of the staffs are working as a full time teacher. However,
every teaching staffs are encouraged for research activities. For example, some
of the teachers spend most of the time doing research (80 % time of work contract) with less teaching
hours (20% time of work contract) while some teacher spend most of their work
time in teaching (80 % time of work
contract) with less hours for research (20%
time of work contract). From my personal experience senior professors usually
spend most of their time in research activities and less time for teaching.
Yes, the
RDI activities is very important to the organization that I am working with. For
example at the University of Vaasa there are different research groups: multidisciplinary
and discipline specific. Each teaching and research staffs belongs to one of
this group and works together towards the own group’s research themes.
Today we had online session, as usual
three different teams were asked to prepare the teaching materials on different
topics. The different topics that we discussed were as follows:
Laws and amendments,
and confidentiality law
Principles of good
administration
Safety of learning
environment
Lesson
planning: Before the online session
What happened during lesson planning, what
went good, what went bad, and what did I learned?
Our team task was to develop and
conduct an online teaching session. The topic for our group’s task was laws
and amendments, and confidentiality law. During the lesson planning we
followed group matrix, in the group matrix we define who does what and how the
final work will be combined. One of the team member was working as a coordinator
and other team member searched for literature. Finally, when we have own
materials team coordinator prepared a sample presentation in which all the team
members incorporated their findings, made comments on the others work, made
some changes to the original ideas and finalized the teaching materials.
During lesson planning, we were
working in a team, like always it’s a bit challenging to make equal distribution
of work. This somewhat I have also experienced during my time as a student, and
also I have heard some complaints about group work from my students during my
teaching. Maybe it’s always like that in a team work either one way or other
someone is working a bit more than other member.
During the lesson planning, I came
across many laws related to education which has significant impact in my future
work as a teacher. The important lessons learned can be described in the
following points:
The different laws related to education (decrees
and amendments in Finland) and confidentiality laws can be found on Finlex web
page, some of these laws are available in English as well, for example,
vocational education and training act. However, now onwards, I know where to
look for if I need to have a look on laws and amendments related to teaching
and education.
Student’s private life is highly protected by Finnish
basic education act. Personal information cannot be shared with spouse,
co-workers, and among students. Whatever
happens at the school needs to remain at school, which cannot be carried to
home or somewhere else.
As a teacher we need to aware of following facts,
Exam question and answer needs to archive for
one academic year, if needed it needs to be archived for more than a year.
Certificates needs to be archived
permanently.
Similarly, the documents related to student
counselling needs to be archived for the duration of studies.
Also, I learned that while working in
a team, maybe rules of the game needs to be clearly defined, needs to be well
communicated and discussed within the team members.
I believe that these lessons for sure
will help me in developing better teaching and learning environment, during my
future teaching.
In general, I enjoyed the team work, I
actively participated in searching literature, developing teaching materials,
and actual online teaching practice session.
ONLINE
TEACHING SESSION
What happened during teaching session,
what went good, what went bad, and why? What did I learned?
First session
We (me and Sanna) were leading the
first teaching session, we talked about laws and amendments, and
confidentiality law. During the teaching session, it was for the first time I
was teaching with Sanna, before the actual teaching we divided the task, who
discusses what, but we also agreed that both of us can interrupt and add points
as and when necessary. Maybe co-lecturing might be a good approach in teaching
and learning. The online teaching went as we planned, I enjoyed.
Second session
The topic for second session was
safety of learning environment. Davis was leading this session, during this
part of the session I came across various aspects of aspects of safety of
learning environment, for example, what to do if a teacher or student is facing
bullying. Also, I came across the Finnish programme called KiVa Koulu, an anti-bullying
programme practices by schools in Finland. I also, learned that as a teacher I should,
First know the different laws yourself and let the student to feel they are safe.
Always talk to the student and inform them about the different rules, regulations, and safety practices within the school. And
Get involved.
In the similar manner I came across socrative.com, an online platform that can be used in teaching and learning to enhance student participation in interaction, in the session we used it in the form of online quiz. I found out to be interesting, maybe I will be using it in my future teaching practice.
Third session
The topic for third session was principles
of good administrations. Heehyun was leading this session, during this session
we discussed about three specific topics principles of good administration,
principles of school administration and principles of education administration.
The key learning from this session was schools administration should make sure
that the every members of the schools follows the rules and regulation,
everybody should have equality for opportunity, and schools environment should
be adoptive to the changes in society and educational world, and so on. The session was interactive, I enjoyed the
session. From this session I learned
that as a teacher, I should respect the rules and regulations, and always
should support the administration to develop a flexible, democratic, and stable
learning environment.
Did you noticed any pattern or approach
that is being followed by different teams while teaching? Did they followed the
same approach or different? Which one did you find interesting? Can these
approaches be taken into practice?
From my experience, today’s online
teaching session was a bid different than the previous session. Every team
presented their ideas differently, for example,
Our (me and Sanna) approach was first
theoretical information………> small short discussion………> theoretical information………>
small short discussion………> concluding remarks.
Davis approach was quiz before theoretical information………>
theoretical information………> feedback to the quiz.
Heehyun’s approach was short discussion………> theoretical
information………> short discussion………> theoretical information………> short
quiz as a conclusion.
Here, we can see that three teams
followed three approach in carrying out online teaching. I don’t know which
approach is better, but during the online session I enjoyed all the three
sessions. I think yes, all these approaches
can be taken into practice.
In the future I would like to try all these three approach in my teaching, hopefully, me and my future students will have better learning experience.
Today we had an interesting session, we
evaluated our colleague’s blog. I have already went through the blogs written
by other group member within my team and other teams as well. I was interested
to see the opinion of my team members on the same topic, this is because we did
the same task together but at the end our experience might be different.
Similarly, I tried to review other team’s member blog, in this case also I selected
those member who were in the same teaching session with me. Here, also I was
willing to see how they see the same work. Finally, there was not much significant
difference in the understanding, only the difference I noticed was in the way
of writing, some of them were a bit longer (introduction to different tasks,
long explanation, own learnings and so on) and in details while others were
straight forward, for example whet was their experience during the teaching
session.
However, personally I do respect peoples own
way of interpretation and writing, until and unless the learning objectives has
been fulfilled, the length of the text does not matter, but there needs to be
something meaningful, understandable, and logical.
During the online session, I had an opportunity
to go through the blogs written by Hosein and Megumi. Both of the blogs were
interesting. Megumi’s blog was a bit longer in comparison to Hosein and my own
blog. The difference can be seen in structure, but I don’t see the difference
in content. Similarly, Hosein and Megumi went through my blog and made similar
comment. After the blog review, we tried to follow the teacher’s instruction and
tried to make an assessment of each other’s blog, but we had a bit confusion in
implementing the grading system. The difficulties was in calculating the final
grade, we realized that we need to use the similar scale, otherwise the three
will be difficulties in calculating the average grade, as the grading scale was
not in number.
In the similar manner, the final open
discussion in the big group was also interesting, the tried to summarize our
discussion and made some comments on our assessment of blogs.
I believe that this session would have been
implemented right away after completing first online session and the following
blog post. Maybe this would have given us a bit different experience both in
lesson planning, implementation, and in writing the blog i.e. reflection.
Lesson for my future learning and writing
blogs.
After today’s session I feel like, maybe I need
to change the structure of my future blogs. Also, the comments from Kimmo was
interesting, he mentioned that we always need to ask ourselves why questions in
completing our blog post, for example what was good and why it was good, what
was bad and why it was bad. When I think about these suggestions, it’s true,
maybe what and why questions will lead me to have better learning experience. In the similar manner, the grading scale needs
to be defined on the basis of objectives of assessment, what is the purpose of
assessment, why we need to have or conduct an assessment. For example, some
assessment is carried out for the purpose of improving learning experience, as
we did in today’s online session, while some assessment is carried out to
evaluate our learning and understanding on certain subject or lesson. Also,
while writing the blog post or anything we write, it’s better to focus on the
target group i.e. who is our targeted audience, what are their needs, what they
expect while reading our blog, and so on.
Thank you all for valuable comments and making the discussion to be interesting and meaningful.
Here in the following link, you can see my presentation http://somup.com/cq632FfcEv, for better understanding my message first watch my presentation, its about 3 minutes and read the following text entitled “My reflection on ideal learning environment”
My reflection on ideal learning environment
Ideal learning environment may have
different meaning for different people. This is because every peoples learning
style is different, for example some prefers to listen to music while reading
while others prefers completely silent environment, some prefers individual
learning while some prefers group works, some prefers visual, some prefers
audio, and so on. But as a teacher the expectation might be same what I mean to
say here is “When we teach what we expect?” maybe each and every teacher
will include following points in answering this questions:
We want student to be active.
We want student to be engaged.
We want student to understand the message we
want to deliver, and so on.
But here comes the big challenge, how
can a teacher achieve these objectives while teaching? In my opinion if a
teacher is able to achieve these objectives then I must say that he/she is
teaching in an ideal learning environment.
Maybe these objectives can be achieved
fully or at least in greater percentage if we understand the basics of learning
theories: behaviorist theory, cognitive theory, constructive theory, and
humanist (motivation) theory.
In my presentation (http://somup.com/cq632FfcEv), I tried
to create an ideal learning environment based on cognitive theory, which I
considered to be one of the best theory in teaching and learning. I believe that
cognitive theory helps us to better understand and develop an ideal learning
environment. According to cognitive theory, knowledge is mental construction
that are developed during learning process. In other words, learning occurs if
a learner is active participant. Therefore, learners always needs to explore,
manipulate, experiment, and try to find answers in their own. This means the
learning environment needs to be such that it stimulates curiosity. According
to cognitive theory, our mind works exactly like a computer, collects the
information …….> process the information…….> use that information to
produce knowledge.
In explaining what is user innovation (http://somup.com/cq632FfcEv) I
followed exactly the same pattern as how our mind works in search of new
knowledge i.e. collects the information …….> process the information…….use
that information to produce knowledge, as explained by cognitive theory. In other words, before explaining what user
innovation is, I cited some pictures representing different user’s innovation
but without mentioning what these pictures represents for, I did this is to
develop a curiosity in listener’s mind, than I asked the listener to make a random
guess about the topic for today’s discussion. After this I posed next question
what might be common among these pictures? Through this question I tried to make
this discussion to be a bit more interesting to listeners. Then I opened up the
topic for today’s discussion i.e. what is user’s innovation? Then I defined
user’s innovation and further explained about the examples to user’s innovation.
Finally, I encouraged the listener to become a user innovator. During the whole
process I tried to develop an interesting learning environment considering the
listener to be the focus of presentation, which I considered to be an ideal
learning environment.
In conclusion, I would say that if we
are able to develop an environment that stimulates curiosity in our mind then
we can achieve our teaching and learning goals. I do also believe that if we
are able to develop some kind of hunger/curiosity/ keen interest then we can
have experience of teaching and learning. This is the basic idea behind
cognitive theory, which can be applied to effective and/or efficient teaching
and learning.
Guney, A., & Al,
S. (2012). Effective learning environments in relation to different learning
theories. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 46,
2334-2338.
My Journey to Vocational Teacher Education 2019-20 