Education and Effective Pedagogy Essay

Submitted By morenita781
Words: 1885
Pages: 8

What challenges may you face in putting into practice, within Curriculum for Excellence, the principles and practice of effective pedagogy in Chemistry, about which I have been learning in class and your wider reading?

Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) was introduced in public funded schools within all local authorities in Scotland with the main aim, to provide an improved, meaningful and more flexible curriculum to all children between 3 and 18 years, regardless their ability, background or race. The aspiration is that all children and young people should become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors to society. Without any doubts, CfE is viewed as one of the most ambitious and developed programmes of educational change undertaken in Scotland. (Scottish Government, 2008)10 Literature offers plenty of explanations about the transition and why it was necessary change the education reform process. The main concerns raised by politicians were that 5-14 curriculum was very crowded and pupils were expected to do too much work. Furthermore, the teachers felt that the curriculum was layered down in a structural manner, also was very prescriptive and they were being ignored on what and how to teach and assess. In the Scottish education system, using CfE, all schools have received a detailed advice from the Scottish Qualification Authority on the syllabus for each subject as well as its examination and it was up to the teachers to build the curriculum for their subject meeting the necessary key principles: experiences and learning outcomes across the curriculum. Just as the education goes; the CfE is closely linked with effective pedagogy and its use in a process of learning and teaching. The revised curriculum in science is based on ideas of contemporary science and the scientific concepts that underpin these and bring them together in three groups: living world, material world and physical world. From these experiences and outcomes, teachers are able to develop relevant teaching context and activities within and beyond science to a depth but appropriate for the students’ stage, class or group, as well as to promote links with other curriculum areas, such as social science, health and wellbeing and technologies. (Scottish Government, 2006)9. CfE and its implementation is an ongoing process and still arises many questions within the education community of schools and teachers. Some teachers think that there are few contradictions in policy documents and these are creating difficulties to implement the curriculum in their subjects, especially with the experiences and learning outcomes, but on the other hand, they are teachers who think that CfE is not very different from 5-14 guidelines

According to Boyd (2008)2, the challenge for the secondary school teachers (and me in the future as a teacher) within the CfE is to use an effective pedagogy in a process of teaching and learning. Framework for this type of education is centered on sharing learning outcomes with students, using dialogue and open discussion to promote their thinking and improve their future learning. The curriculum includes not only what is taught but also how is taught. Flanders (1970)4, reported, that when students’ questions and ideas are being included into the learning activities they seem to learn more, and also develop more positive attitudes towards the teacher and the learning process. But, if the teacher is being sarcastic or even ignore their suggestions, students appear consistently being unprepared and achieve less in the subject. As a result of this, all teachers are being encouraged to engage with new ideas and theories on how to deliver individual subjects to pupils in an original way, but with the best possible outcome using principles and practice of effective pedagogy in their methodology.

In education we are familiar with two types of learning: passive and active learning. Passive learning