3-Read Friday #012
Variation Theory, lesson planning, and subject knowledge
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Here are three blog posts that I found interesting this week.
1. What variation theory is and isn't by Christian Moore Anderson
Regular readers will know what a massive fan of Variation Theory I am. Science teacher, Christian Moore Anderson, really gets to the heart of what Marton’s theory is actually about. He cautions against simply showing a series of examples and non-examples, and instead makes the case for initially focussing on differences, considering carefully what changes we can make to draw our students’ attention to the critical features. I hope to get Chrtian on my podcast in the near future to discuss more!
2. Unit Planning by Dylan Kane
For the first few years of my teaching career, I was rubbish at planning lessons. If Dylan’s post had been around back then, I could have saved myself (and my students) a lot of pain! Dylan describes how even though he plans individual lessons, the most important part of his process is first considering the unit of lessons as a whole, which could be serval weeks long. I have found this approach leads to more coherent lessons, and allows me to be more flexible as I am not tied to trying to cover each idea within the confines of 50 minutes.
3. What Do Teachers ACTUALLY Need to Know? by Dan Meyer
There is a nice synergy between articles 2 and 3 in this week’s 3-Read Friday, because teachers’ awareness of misconceptions (the focus of this excellent post by Dan Meyer) is a really important facet in lesson planning. Dan draws the important distinction between knowing your subject and knowing how to teach your subject, and how a teacher's awareness of where students are likely to struggle can improve the latter. On a related note, you can challenge yourself (and your colleagues) to predict the most common choice of wrong answer for any of our questions on Eedi, and see if you are correct with the click of a button.
If you found this edition of 3-Read Friday useful, feel free to share it with colleagues. Also, you can check out all the back issues of my Eedi newsletter and Tips for Teachers newsletter here. But, most importantly of all, have a great weekend.
Craig