Embarking on your journey as an Early Career Teacher (ECT), you're stepping into a vibrant world with diversity, challenges, and opportunities for growth. One concept that will be a cornerstone of your teaching career, shaping your approach to this dynamic environment, is pedagogy.
Understanding what pedagogy is and why it matters is crucial for your professional development and the profound impact you'll have on your students' learning experiences.
What is Pedagogy?
At its core, pedagogy refers to the art and science of teaching. It's how you, as a teacher, engage with your students, the strategies you employ to facilitate learning, and the underlying theory that informs those strategies.
Pedagogy encompasses your approach to delivering lessons, the methods you use to assess student understanding, and the feedback mechanisms you implement to support and guide your students.
When we discuss the pedagogy of teaching, we're delving into the essence of our role as an educator. It's about bringing the curriculum to life, making it accessible and meaningful for every student in our classrooms.
Planning a lesson with pedagogy in mind means considering not just the content you need to cover but also the diverse ways you can deliver that content, considering your teaching preferences, your experiences, and, most importantly, the needs and experiences of your students.
The Importance of Pedagogical Approaches
Your pedagogical approach influences every aspect of your teaching, from lesson planning to classroom management and even how you assess and provide feedback to your students. Age, for instance, plays a significant role in determining the most appropriate pedagogical practice. Young learners benefit more from hands-on, experiential learning, while older students engage more deeply with abstract concepts and critical thinking exercises. Drawing from a wide range of academic disciplines and your own experiences, primarily if you've taught various age groups, can inform your pedagogical strategies, making your teaching both impactful and inclusive.
The Four Main Pedagogical Approaches
Understanding the four main pedagogical approaches, constructivism, social constructivism, liberationism, and behaviourism, offers a framework to explore different ways of facilitating learning.
These four pedagogical approaches allow us to delve into the heart of educational theory. They shape the landscape of learning. Each approach, distinct in its philosophy and application, provides a unique lens through which we can understand and facilitate the complex learning process.
By exploring these foundational strategies, educators are equipped with a diverse toolkit that allows for the adaptation and tailoring of teaching methods to meet the varied needs of students.
This exploration is not merely academic; it's a practical guide that empowers teachers to create engaging, effective, and transformative learning experiences. Understanding these approaches is essential for developing a responsive, dynamic, and deeply attuned pedagogical practice that is responsive to the evolving landscape of education and the diverse tapestry of student needs and backgrounds.
Constructivism
Imagine a classroom where students are the architects of their learning, engaging with hands-on concepts and reflecting on their experiences. This is constructivism in action—a belief in the power of individual experiences as the foundation of knowledge. Whether through project-based learning, inquiry, or exploration, constructivism places students at the heart of their learning journey. The best teachers think deeply about how they can create environments that foster this type of exploration, whether it's through open-ended questions, collaborative projects, or integrating real-world problems that students can solve.
Social Constructivism
Social Constructivism builds on learning as a social endeavour, emphasising the collaborative relationship between teacher and student. Drawing on the work of cognitive psychologist Lev Vygotsky, this approach could involve organising small group projects where students explore concepts together, providing opportunities for peer teaching and learning, and facilitating discussions that allow students to voice their thoughts and questions.
Liberationism
Liberationism, inspired by Paulo Freire, focuses on the idea that education should be a transformative experience that empowers students by addressing and breaking down barriers to learning. This approach calls for a pedagogy that is responsive to students' backgrounds, interests, and challenges. This might mean designing lessons that draw on students' cultural references, encouraging critical discussions about societal issues, or creating projects that allow students to explore and address real-life challenges.
Behaviorism
Behaviourism views learning as a more teacher-centred process, where direct instruction and structured activities dominate. Rooted in the research of psychologists like Thorndike, Pavlov, and Skinner, this approach emphasises the teacher's authority, the delivery of knowledge through a structured curriculum, and the use of repetition, drills, and demonstrations to reinforce learning.
The History of Pedagogy
From ancient Greece to the first public schools in England, the stories of history’s most successful and prodigious educators (i.e. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Marx, Montessori, Dewey, etc.) inform today’s pedagogy.
Moving forward, the Medieval period established educational institutions that were dominated by religious influence. But during this time the theoretical characteristics we are looking for in curriculum began to form through the Trivium and Quadrivium method. The Trivium and Quadrivium were taught as the seven liberal arts and were used as subject matter organisers.
The Renaissance and Enlightenment brought a return to the importance of humanism, as well as the sciences, allowing teaching to develop even more. The setting up of the first organised schools in England also allowed schooling to develop massively as now places to be educated were available and education was becoming more widespread.
As the Industrial Revolution gained momentum in the 19th century, the demand for standardised education arose, and educators embraced theories of teaching and learning that led to the development of the pedagogy. During this period, quality became relative to just educational quantity, forming progressive education as exhibited in today’s teaching activities. There has been considerable development in the thinking capacity of the individual being taught because, unlike in the traditional classroom set-up where the teacher does most of the talking and does not invite the students’ opinions or argue their thoughts, the lecture method of teaching has given rise to more communication among the teacher and the students.
In recent decades, digital technology and the globalisation of knowledge have highlighted the need for pedagogical innovation. In several cases, educators are examining blended learning, exploring or integrating digital learning in the classroom, and looking to personalisation to accommodate diverse student learning needs.
By recognising the history of pedagogy, we realise that teaching is a continuing adventure of human beings to understand teaching and learning better. History of Education supports us to comprehend the relationship between knowledge, society and education. We categorically feel enriched with pedagogical theories with the aid of a historical perspective because if we know more about what happened in the past, we can enhance our future by making changes whenever it is necessary.
Final Thoughts on Pedagogy
As you begin your career, understanding the complexity of pedagogy and being confident in the classroom is crucial. Your journey into understanding pedagogy is much more than just scratching the surface. You will delve into the philosophy and the practical sides of how we teach and how our pupils learn. This will remind you that you are more than a teacher following the curriculum, you are a teacher constructing engaging, inclusive and purposeful lessons that work for your pupils.
And so begins the journey into the ‘glorious artifice’ of teaching. Or something like that. It’s important. Without a solid foundation in pedagogy, you could be lost. Actually, it’s essential and this exploration is not just academic. This is a practical digging down into the heart of what you teach. In reality, pedagogy is the person you become with more practice under your belt. And look, to be brutally honest, pedagogy defines every decision you make in class. People who talk about teaching and learning are prone to using long and unnecessary words that make them sound more important. But pedagogy is important, and here’s why. How we approach pedagogy could be the single most significant impact on how our students meet with success.
As you grow as a teacher, you will feel more comfortable and understand pedagogy much more. Your understanding and knowledge of pedagogy will become one of your many strengths as a teacher, and you will always be able to incorporate it into each lesson. This will, in turn, make each lesson even easier to make meaningful and accessible for all of your students.
No matter where you are in your career, it all comes back to the students. These are the students who will benefit most from your hard work in developing and enhancing your pedagogy. By challenging yourself to fully understand the educational theories and practices on which instruction is intended and your intent, you will be able to provide meaningful, memorable and motivational lessons. Essentially, you will become a better teacher. You want your instruction to be at a proficient level, aligning with the scope and sequence for your grade level. However, you also want it to be laced with provocations, opening doors to curiosity in which your students will grow and mature at a rapid pace. When they walk out your door, they are equipped with the necessary knowledge, skills and courage to face whatever their futures hold.
Exploring pedagogy is truly a personal journey as well as a professional one. The more we learn about pedagogy, the more we are able to create meaningful lesson content for our students. These lessons impact their academic and personal experiences as life-long learners in education.
