Teacher's Thoughts

Scaffolding is helping someone because they cannot do the task by themselves. But is this an assumption? Having strong instrinsic motivation, time and the necessary disposition, everyone can learn a skill. Being scaffolded teaches reliance among other things. If you scaffold someone to achieve an outcome, are you not devoiding them of the opportunity to strain themselves and acquire new skills? To be agentic, to learn by discovery? Maybe you will save them time and effort but is it beneficial in the long run? Is it not deskilling, spoiling the learner and making them expect support every time they start a new task. Gradual withdrawal of scaffolding (fading the scaffolding - see Pea, 2004) might be a good way to cultivate independence similar to how you teach a toddler to walk. You help them in the beginning and take them by the hand until they are stable enough to walk by themselves.  Another way scaffolding can be deficitizing the learner (just came up with that word) is that it c...

Pedagogical ideas, scholarship and interventions should aim to make a difference to teaching practise and learning outcomes first and foremost. Everything else is box ticking and ego. Very often the most valuable and meaningful innovations or tweaks come from obstacles and frustration with what we face in our daily teaching lives. This blog post was prompted by the below article and is largely a response and reflection on some of the ideas therein. Thirkell, E. (2026). Frugal pedagogical innovation: reframing creativity in higher education teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2026.2630374 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13562517.2026.2630374#d1e717 This paper discusses pertinent issues that I can relate to and offers insights from three types of actors in HE on innovation. It focuses on the quiet, unrecognised innovation that happens in every classroom but remains hidden apart from staff room converstions and sharing of ideas. It a...

This week I had an introductory session with Chinese students coming to study at a UK university. One of the lesson aims was to introduce them to the active learning model which is commonly applied in Western educational institutions. We watched a carefully crafted presentation referring to recent research on the benefits and indeed better outcomes of the active learning approach as opposed to the passive learning model.  In the ensuing discussion I gained further insights into students' own learning experiences and idea of passive and active learning. It was interesting to note they considered passive from the point of view of their confidence in expressing their ideas. If they have knowledge of the topic they said they would be more active in participating and if they did not, they would keep silent which is only logical and natural. Personality types were also menteioned which further complicates the dychotomy. They were discussing it from the point of view of the self-awareness...

A fundamental principle of assessment is validity - we should be testing whatever we taught. When it comes to research skills and academic writing modules, we are teaching students to be able to independently research a topic via a set of ordered steps in a process. I personally am in faviour of a very hadns-on, demo-style of teaching, especially in the initial stages of the research process. When I teach finding and evaluating sources, for example, I ask students to follow my steps on their devices and do exactly as I do: I come up with example key words related to a general topic of students' discipline area and perform a search on the university's library website or Google scholar. I then look at titles and if suitable read the asbtracts to decide on a source all the while thinking aloud as if this is my topic and I am the researcher. I show the students my thinking process behind discarding or choosing an article. I read the abstract and then summarise the main findings in ...