Terry Freedman has some useful reminders on how not to make an educational technology lesson boring.. Actually, he’s written a pretty good reminder of how to plan good lessons.
Here’s a piece of the well written and quite handy post:
The teacher spends too much time talking
Most people learn by doing. Even teachers mostly learn by practising
teaching, not reading about it or listening to someone else talk about
it. Yet I have observed lessons in which, out of a 55 minute lesson,
the teacher spoke for 45 minutes. It gets worse. In those sorts of
lessons, the teacher loves his own voice so much that the 10 minutes
the pupils actually get to do something do not come in one chunk, but
in two or three blocks of a few minutes each. Typically, the teacher
says, “OK, now I’d like you to try that yourself. Remember, you select
the text and then click on the B to make it bold.” This leads on to
another characteristic of such lessons, that of boring activities.”It may sound harsh, but as another consultant said to me recently,
quite often teachers prevent learning, and that they should get out of
the way and allow the pupils to learn!
When I started teaching and giving conference presentations, I used to feel like I was "cheating "when I would introduce an idea or a concept and then give the students or conference participants time to actually get their hands dirty with that idea, either through a simulation or a time for hands on work. Since I wasn’t filling the session with me, it sometimes felt like I wasn’t performing in the proper role of a teacher. Of course, I was wrong, even though sometimes I still feel that way. I find, though, that I get the most positive feedback when I do the least amount of talking.
Weird, huh? It seems almost counter-intuitive — but it works.
I encourage you to check out the full post.
