Lecture 4.4: Labeling

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Del curso dictado por Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Learners and Learning

86 calificaciones

Commonwealth Education Trust

Foundations of Teaching for Learning: Learners and Learning

86 calificaciones

The Foundations of Teaching for Learning programme is for anyone who is teaching, or who would like to teach, in any subject and any context - be it at school, at home or in the workplace. With dynamic lessons taught by established and respected professionals from across the Commonwealth, this eight course programme will see you develop and strengthen your skills in teaching, professionalism, assessment, and more. As you carry on through the programme, you will find yourself strengthening not only your skills, but your connection with colleagues across the globe. A professional development opportunity not to be missed. The teacher’s work becomes meaningful when it is informed by research and theories of learning, and their relationship to actual practice. This course provides an opportunity for you to identify and understand students’ expectations and prior learning. Enhance your course by joining the Commonwealth teaching community on our website, Facebook and Twitter.

De la lección

The power of the peer group

The four lectures this week are all related to the theme of peer groups. We look at the positive and negative effects of peer groups, including how smoking drugs and alcohol problems can affect the classroom and the school, the concerning issue of bullying, and the problems that emerge when we label students in particular ways. I encourage you to write a narrative in which you bring together a reflection on your own classroom, the relationships that peers have within it and how this impacts on your teaching. At the end of this week we are offering you the second interview between myself and Professor John MacBeath, where will discuss some of the issues that arose during weeks three and four. Also, this week, as well as the quiz, you should be starting to finalise the second peer assessment essay.

Lecture 4.1: Understanding peer groups16:05

Lecture 4.2: Smoking, alcohol, drugs and peer pressure12:55

Lecture 4.3: Bullying12:58

Lecture 4.4: Labeling11:35

Conoce a los instructores

Associate Professor George Oduro
Associate Professor of Educational Leadership
University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Professor John MacBeath
Professor Emeritus
University of Cambridge, UK

[MUSIC]

You are welcome to week four, lecture four which focuses on labeling.

What is a label? Teachers begin from virtually the first

day of a child's entry to the classroom to classify the child on the basis of

attitudes, applications, relationships and many other signs.

These may have been passed on by parents, siblings or other children but

they are very difficult to overlook or try to approach children with an open mind -

a clean slate.

Rist, 1970, has this to say, "The expectations teachers hold for

their students can be generated as early as the first few days of the

school year and then remain stable over the months to follow."

What labels, as a teacher, do you use to describe children?

What labels do children use to describe themselves?

What labels do parents use?

What labels do you find in the literature?

And what have you noticed about the effects of being labeled?

Have you considered the power of words on learners?

When words such as clever, brilliant,

intelligent, smart, quick,

gifted, creative and obedient

are used as labels on children,

have you considered the power or the extent to which

such words which influence the child? Each of

these have their opposite. What terms are

used in your school, classroom or home?

What would be the alternatives of each of these words?

Clever,

intelligent, brilliant,

smart, creative, quick,

obedient? Think about these

and identify the opposite for each of these words, in a moment.

Now, have you

considered the effects that these labels, or any other form of label,

would have on the child's identity?

How may the self-identity and behaviour of individuals be determined

or influenced by the terms used to describe or classify them?

What are the effects of labeling?

As you'll find on this slide,

once a person has been labeled, it is extremely difficult to remove that

label. That person becomes stigmatized, and

is likely to be considered and treated, as by others as naughty,

stupid, deviant, or whatever label is attached to him or her.

It is therefore important that, as a teacher,

you become

careful in using labels to describe

your children, because labels can have a very

strong impact or influence on the child. Every

label, when you describe a child as slow, or bright,

trouble-maker, or difficult, entails a set of

expectations that are associated with it.

Expectations that when made known to

the student may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, if you tell the students: "You are slow.

You are not university material.",

this can have an adverse effect on the progress of the child.

There is an excerpt from the book Pygmalion which I want to consider.

The extract says, "If you think you are only

a flower girl, you will always be a flower girl."

What does this mean to you, in terms

of labeling and how it affects the child's development?

As I feel through the saying, I remember my own experience, where as a result of

poverty, as a result of my parents not

being able to send me to a secondary school,

the impression was created that I wasn't university material,

therefore I should not think about the university.

But because of encouragement by my parents,

because of counseling that I got from other adults in the community

who kept telling

me, "George, you can make it." I took to

a private study, and was able to go through a university,

after then the University of Cambridge, where I did my PhD.

It is the resilience,

it is the impact of counseling, the

encouragement, that helped me to go beyond

that "You cannot do it", seen to the

PhD level. As a teacher, you

need to encourage your children. To make the

best out of the worst context within which they find themselves.

So, as a teacher, go beyond labels to encourage

children to have high expectations of themselves.

A story from an Australian student

could be of interest to you. Let's read it on the slide

and find out how it relates to the story I told you.

Encourage your children. We need also

to consider Plato's book, The Republic, in

which he created what is called the magnificent myth,

in which he urged people to believe

that there are different types of children.

Some can be described as gold, some who have

more silver in their make up, and some who are mainly base metal.

Which implies that there are some children who can, and those who cannot,

so that society can be constructed.

Now, this is one thing which the

teacher in the classroom must try to avoid

because it does not help children

to progress, to aspire higher in terms of achievement.

And you need to reflect on the story I told you about myself, in understanding

this magnificent myth - which others have

described as the noble lie, because we know in reality, that is not the case.

Then there's also the question of language.

As we've already mentioned, language plays a crucial

role in the whole process of learning. A language which

categorised children as feeble-minded, imbeciles,

and uneducable would today be almost universally regarded with dismay.

We are moving slowly but progressively to question the

Platonic myth of children as gold, silver and base metal.

We have come to understand more fully the

harmful affects of labeling. And this is what

MacBeath, 2011 says in his book, To Be a Teacher.

Now, take time and reflect on the issue of labeling.

How do you describe your students to colleagues?

In other words, ask yourself, how do I describe my students to colleagues?

To their parents? And to children themselves?

What labels are used by others in my school and by children?

What have I observed as the effect of children being labeled?

How might I pay attention to the language used by myself

and by children in my class, outside school, in

the yard, playground, or even the dining hall?

These are questions you need to reflect on, remembering

that every child has the potential to reach their highest

level, so far as learning is concerned. Thank you.

[MUSIC]

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