Pedagogy In Education

Any close examination of the modern approach to education will reveal that it is a culmination and refinement of teaching practices that have traditionally been followed in schools. This paper will make a case that holds that the contemporary practices carried out in schools do not take into account the design and functions of the brain. This failure to account for behaviours that are related to specific human needs and the conditions that ignite the drive to have them satisfied, creates a major impediment to maximising education outcomes.

The core contention is: that a behaviourist approach to learning and behaviour management that is based on observation of a student’s use of cognitive powers alone, is destined to fail. This is not an

These competencies are ranked from satisfactory up to mastery; more specifically teachers are graded from ‘Graduate Teacher’ up to ‘Professional Leadership’.

In the main the descriptors outlined by the Institute have their derivation in the ‘productive pedagogy’ work that has come from research carried out by Jenny Gore of the University of Newcastle. As the title implies, the teaching activities described by Gore would be those used to identify pedagogy. A broad definition of pedagogy is the correct use of teaching strategies including the context of instruction, the techniques involved in that instruction and the assessment and reporting of that operation.

Every few years a new way of thinking about pedagogy is thrust upon teachers; ‘the next big thing in learning and development’. Think of Bloom's ‘Taxonomy’, de Bono's ‘Six Thinking Hats’ or Gardner's ‘Multiple Intelligence Approach’. These programs, and others, underpinned many hours of teacher training and development. This latest ‘big thing’ to catch the attention of educators, Productive Pedagogy, is not really all that new. It is a further refinement and repackaging of previous practices that have been successful. This identification and refinement of human activity lies at the heart of a behaviourist model of

Just as the ‘new approaches’ to learning are underpinned by a behaviourist’s methodology, the academics and practitioners, who have developed this new behaviour management approach, have done the same.

Although there is a wealth of information that ‘validates’ these approaches the tests are, as explained above, rarely, if ever, conducted in resource poor schools in low socioeconomic areas. It would be a brave academic who would examine their ideas in such an environment.

The problem the author finds with these behaviour programs reflects a more wide-ranging criticism of current education theory. This is the unfortunate feature of modern academic life where investigations have become more and more compartmentalized; more specialized. The approaches of the past and the contemporary tactics have produced a series of distillation and testing of existing practices. The most common ‘tool’ used for such work is the dreaded butcher’s paper (or more sophisticated