Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding

About the book

"Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding" is a 19 minutes award winning short film about teaching at University and higher level educational institutions. The film looks at higher level education from three different perspectives; the student's perspective, the teacher's perspective and the perspective towards the subject matter to be taught and learned. Finally, all these insights are integrated - and the film presents one of the most important insights from research in the area of teaching/learning; namely "Constructive Alignment" (developed by John Biggs).

In the film, we follow two prototypical student strategies, personified as "Susan" and "Robert", who have very different motivations for being at University. Susan is internally motivated - and attends University in order to learn exciting new things and skills. Robert is externally motivated - and his goal is, not necessarily to learn, but to pass exams, get a degree, and get a decent job. We follow the two students (student strategies) through their endeavors at University tracing them through the three prespectives of the film earlier mentioned .

In addition to presenting "models of students" on which teachers may act, the film also presents a categorization of different cognitive levels of understanding (with concrete examples), looks at how we humans acquire new knowledge and competences, and how to use all this to understand concretely what a teacher can do to ensure that all types of students actually learn what the teacher wants them to.

The genre of the film is "edutainment" - a contraction of EDU(cation) and (enter)TAINMENT: with primary emphasis on the EDU part; however, the film employs substantial and carefully dosed portions of humour in order to engage the viewer, to provoke reflection, and to make it a joy to watch.

The film is already in use by teaching/learning units at various universities and institutions around the world, for teaching to new teachers - and to "upgrade" and provide a theoretical foundation for experienced teachers. The film is primarily intended for educational development units and for teachers, but students will also take away valuable insights and knowledge from it (which may have a positive impact on their learning behavior).

We expect the film to have the strongest impact when used in learning context. It is excenllent for "big-screen presentation" as a basis ofr and to start a debate about teaching. The DVD includes a menu and subtitles in seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German and Danish.

Table of contents

Structure: The film is logically structured into four parts:

Part 1: (4'20'')

Learning (Student Perspective)

Part one looks at university teaching from a student perspective. We meet Susan and Robert who are prototypes of two different kinds of students with very different motivations for being at university.

Part 2: (3'07'')

Teaching (Teachers Perspective)

Part two adopts a teacher perspective. We meet teachers at levels 1,2 and 3 (according to John Biggs' "three levels of thinking about teaching") who respectively focus on "what students are", "what teachers do" and "what students do".

Part 3: (6'10'')

Understanding (Knowledge Perspective)

Part three takes a knowledge perspective on teaching. We look at how we, homo sapiens, acquire new information in terms of the old - and how "understanding" can happen at five different levels (according to "The SOLO Taxonomy").

Part 4: (3'43'')

The Solution (Constructive Alignment)

Part four integrates all previous and presents one of the most important insights from the research area of Didactics (University Studies in Education), namely: "Constructive Alignment" (developed by John Biggs).

Links

The film can be seen online here