Webinar 1

Created: 24.9.2022, Last edited: 20.10.2022

In our first webinar, our team (Group 3) focused on the topic of "How does student-centered approach, personalization and competence-based system affect the planning?" The planning and preparations were interesting to say the least :-). We all have jobs and can only meet outside of working hours. But we have lives as well, so, it was difficult to find time to work together on the material. In the end the only way was to meet at 5:00 AM in the mornings (not kidding, we even made this into a habbit that seems to go on for the forseeable future).

PLANNING / PREPARATION

We decided to create a lesson that demonstrates a student-centerd approach with personalized content. We brainstormed different options, and finally decided to use some material I, personally, created over the years. My initial material was about the Pythagorean Theorem, however, my teammate showed us a video of a delivery robot, so we changed to consider that as the learning outcome.

We defined a case-study focused on Victor, a fictional character who graduated from mathematics and aspires to become a software engineer. The demo lesson illustrated the competence of 'assessing the feasibility of the trip': the robot has to decide by itself if the trip is possible considering the remaining battery life.

While the rest of the team focused on the theoretical part of our presentation, I took my material and tailored it for the lesson. More precisely, I:

• separated the above video into 3 parts, with new, minor edits to better fit the learning objective;
• edited this interactive demo [1] by adding beginner-level instructions to the page;
• simplified the source code for computing the hypotenuse and wrote code for assessing the trip feasibility;
• modified the typing game [2] to contain code that matches the video;
• made slides for each of the following learning objectives / assessment criteria:
  1. Can calculate the distance between two given points​
  2. Can assess the feasibility of a trip given the remaining battery life​
  3. Can demonstrate the Pythagorean theorem in some way​
  4. Can implement the distance function in a programming language​
  5. Can implement the feasibility function in a programming language​

When I was done, I read the book from Hyppönen & Lindén [3] and extracted few related quotes from it and related literature.

DEMO LESSON

During the webinar, I began with the demo lesson and focused on the 3rd learning objective: To demonstrate the Pythagorean Theorem in some way. I did a quick survey to see what material is suitable for each participant and made choices according to this diagram

Teaching the mathematics went well, and my students liked the experience. After the teaching, students had to think about how the lesson was personalized and how we supported Victor with our material. The students made notes using Padlet [4].

THEORY

The lesson followed with theoretical aspects like explaining competence-based education, where each student can proceed to master new skills and knowledge at their own pace. The role of the teacher is to guide, to offer material suitable for the student. The teacher needs to consider what skills the student already has and other things like what motivates the student. Teachers facilitate learning by taking these things into account.

In Finland, students are expected to take an active role in designing their own learning activities, because learning only happens when the student wants it to. "Teaching in itself does not lead to learning, since the actions of the students themselves, studying, are essential to learning." [5]

Our presentation ended with a reflection session where we used padlet again [6]. From there, I can see that my students thought the case study in the beginning was really good. The lesson also seems to have been a success. One slightly negative comment was that there were too many slides, however, I think it only seemed like that because of the way I structured my presentation...

OTHER PRESENTATIONS

After our presentation, other three followed. In the first one we learned about four different learning theories: Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, Connectivism. The presentation included an inspiring video as well and a Kahoot session where we evaluated our new knowledge.

The second presentation focused on the laws and regulations that affect the planning and where we can find all this information.

Because there's a huge number of laws that affect teachers and students in some way, the content was limited to the most important ones and to make these approachable, we had to do independent study where each of us had a different case.

I had to consider Fernando, a fictional character, interested in pursuing University, however, he has some concerns. He heard from his brother that it is quite abstract (theoretical) and is worried that it may not lead to a 'real job'. Fernando also has dyslexia and is interested in games.

I had to consider what laws can benefit Fernando. I concluded that these are:

• The right to educational support (Because of dyslexia)
• Cooperation with working and business life (Because uncertain about work possibilities)
• Demonstration of competencies and feedback on competence development (Because he has game development competences already)

To help Fernando, as a teacher, I would:

• Create material less focused on reading (Because of dyslexia)
• Give real-world applications (Because uncertain about work possibilities)
• Try to teach using games (Because Fernando likes games)

The third presentation focused on pedagogical scripts and how they help to promote learning. The presentation was very hands-on and, unfortunately, I had to skip most of it because of a room double-booking issue (someone had to use the room I was in).

I later watched the recording of the lesson and mentally completed the task which was to make a pedagogical script with the learning outcome of: How to catch a butterfly.

The students used a jamboard where they had to write the learning outcome and define the course content. In my opinion, such a course could contain, a section on butterfly species, followed by areas where they live, techniques to catch a butterfly and necessary equipment.

The teacher can prepare for such a lesson by taking pictures of various butterflies, creating a map with the habitat and by making a demonstration of how to catch the butterfly (maybe as a video).

Student activity can be practical = going outside to catch butterflies. The lesson ended with reflection using padlet.

I also studied the blog post [7] of our teacher in this third session, and found it interesting that their strategy was to select a task where they hoped we (the students) are not familiar with. This is opposite to the cycling task we had in the opening days where most of us were (probably) familiar with.

REFLECTION

After the lesson I started to think about what I just learned and how it impacts my working life. I'm always confronted with students of different backgrounds, so I often need to diversify the content. Learning theory is a mix of everything, but I believe that math topics often fall within constructivism because we always build on top of existing knowledge (starting with the axioms).

I can now better relate to the question: “How does student-centered approach, personalization and competence-based system affect the planning?” . This gives the teacher some extra work to do; not just use the same explanation on every lesson, year after year... Luckily, in math and computer science there are many ways of reaching to the same conclusion, so, I find it relatively easy to personalize. It is also relatively easy to give exercises to students.

REFERENCES

1. https://radufromfinland.com/projects/pythagoras
2. https://radufromfinland.com/projects/hackeracer/index.php?race=The+Pythagorean
3. Olli Hyppönen and Satu Lindén, 2009, Handbook for teachers- course structures, teaching methods and assessment​
4. https://padlet.com/jinbae16/su9pgyu9xsfr6vsb
5. Michael Uljens 1997, School Didactics and Learning, 35–36​
6. https://padlet.com/jinbae16/52hrym8znq02knsx
7. https://onalearningtrip.blogspot.com/2022/09/a-jump-intoteaching-this-weekwe-had-our.html