[MUSIC] Welcome to Foundations of Teaching for Learning, week four, putting curriculum to work. Lecture one today will focus on issues of interpretation. The written curriculum, that's what we have in our hand. And as a teacher I ask myself, what do I know of it? This is a piece of document handed down to me to guide my teaching and learning. And how well am I going to use it, depends very much on how I interpret it and understand the contents. What do I make of it? Look at this slide. It has listed down all of the components that you could find in a written document. Like the time, allocation is given. Subject, topic, objectives, or educational goals. Themes, material or equipment that will be used for teaching. The syllabus, the lesson, teacher activity, student activity, assessment, or evaluation. And now you may want to ask yourself, in your system, which of these are within your own control? And what do they require of you in conducting your lessons? Do you understand all of them? And who might you need to consult if you have some questions? What kind of learning theories that you could use in your teaching? And what kind of strategies would help you bring about that learning experiences of the students? And how do you keep the student context in perspective at all times? More importantly you may also want to think about how do I make the teaching and learning more student-centered? Where and when do I come in? How do I organise and facilitate the students' participation in the learning process? What would be the most appropriate classroom setting for my teaching? How do I make sure that students are learning what I want them to learn? So, these are some of the questions that must be kept at all times in the minds of the teachers. Now, we want to look at the aspects of curriculum that we discussed earlier. We have formal, informal, and hidden curriculum, that we've seen. And at this point I would like to introduce Jerome Bruner's three aspects of curriculum. That is enactive, iconic, and symbolic. Enactive talks about the active participation, or active doing of things, by students. And iconic is about how students picturise things in your mind. And symbolic is more on the abstract conceptualisation done by students. For example, like, formulas or equations, and so on. Here, once again, you may want to ask yourself, which aspects of curriculum can I draw on most usefully? Is it the formal, informal, hidden or enactive, iconic, symbolic? Which are the most applicable in my context? How may I influence learning with these as aspects in mind? So, these give teachers a kind of direction in planning their lessons and in teaching the lessons that they've planned. Now, comes Assessment as a Function of Curriculum. Am I aware of the areas of critical learning in the lesson that I conducted today? How do I assess them? How can I build assessment integrally into the teaching process? And another question that you will want to ask is, is it non-threatening? Is it not time consuming? Was it fun and challenge-based? Was it enhancing learning of the students? So, in any assessment that we do as a teacher we may want to ask these questions so that it is more student-friendly or student-centered and brings about better learning. When the teaching is over we always would like to evaluate our lesson. How did it go for the day? So, you may have your own method of evaluating, or I may want to introduce a tool to you which was developed by Edward De Bono which is called the PNI tool. P, what worked positively in your teaching? N, what did not turn out well? The negative aspects. And I, what was interesting in your teaching? Think about these three aspects and you will be able to create new ideas for change and improvement. Now, we have come to the final session of the lesson today. With a colleague of yours you may want to think about what scope do you have for adaptation within the written curriculum? To what extent are you able to rewrite it? How do you, or might you, build assessment integrally into the curriculum? How might you use, or adapt the De Bono evaluation tool into your classroom evaluation practices? Thank you. See you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
