Through this course you will start to critically examine your own ideas about education, teaching and learning. The critique will be developed through engagement with theories and ideas developed through educational research. You will be encouraged to use these ideas to challenge or support your own ideas about education. Each week we will focus on one key question, using video lectures, key readings and challenges to explore some commonplace notions about education.
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With the guidance of the course team, you will be asked to use these ideas to critically reflect on your own understandings and experience. By the end of the course, you will have developed a personal response to the main question: what is your preferred future for education?
Syllabus
WEEK 1
How do we learn?
This week we focus on the important question of "how do we learn?". One of our aims this week is to demonstrate the learning approach of this course as well as to get you to think about how you have learnt in the past, and to question some of your own assumptions about learning.
WEEK 2
What is intelligence and does it matter?
In this second week of the course we focus on the tricky issue of intelligence. In the resources this week, we explore what we mean by intelligence and how it can affect learning and educational success.
WEEK 3
What makes a good teacher?
In the third week of this course, we turn our attention from learning to teaching. In the resources this week we explore our images of "good" teachers and consider where these images come from.
WEEK 4
Can schools make a difference?
In this fourth week, we turn our attention from individual classrooms and the relationship between learning and teaching, and focus on schools as organisations
WEEK 5
Why do governments fund education?
In this penultimate week of the course we expand our discussion still further and consider the role education plays in our societies.
WEEK 6
What future for education?
In this final week of the course, we return to the question that started it all off: what future for education? The content is a little different this week, but the structure should be familiar to you.
