A Peer Review Response: Active Pedagogy and the Link to Assessment

Abstract

Once again, Mark's journal has provided a rich source of ideas about teaching and learning. In this entry, like Mark, I'll focus primarily on pedagogy, and I'll include some related comments about course planning and assessment along way. Mark has been teaching separate courses in video production and introduction to scriptwriting at college level for years, need to design a year-long course for his high school students allowed him to integrate processes. Designing high school course prompted Mark to reflect on typical curricular approaches to video production and scriptwriting-and that is worth noting because such moments of deliberation are too rare in hurried lives of faculty. In fact, once we have prepared our courses, faculty don't often rethink them; furthermore, research suggests that faculty don't do much formal planning at all. Rather they tend to engage in routine course planning, fine-tuning and tweaking this or that course component. Major overhauls are rare and usually precipitated when some strong external influence (like a change in accreditation criteria or job market) or unavoidable fact of organizational life (for example, a change in general education requirements or results of an academic program review) necessitate change. For Mark, freedom to integrate two related dimensions of visual communication foregrounds problems associated with dividing complex tasks into discrete courses; it's possible, he suggests, that reducing a multidimensional task to sequences of actions actually diminishes students' ability to grasp whole. Synthesizing material from scriptwriting and video production courses, Mark argues, more effectively simulates process of negotiation and compromise that occurs when individuals translate written text for screen. Mark's students, therefore, learn first-hand challenges associated with producing what they have scripted. This is a pretty thing, Mark writes, but it also may explain why many of our students struggle with nuts and bolts of storytelling with pictures and sound. I want to focus on that small thing because I believe it has potential to generate substantial returns for students. To help students consider production process holistically, Mark and his teaching partner, Ms. Nancy Settle, developed a set of visualization exercises to enhance student understanding of relationship between a script and images that communicate those ideas on film. The instructors frame what they are doing as teaching the grammar and syntax of film and television, and they cleverly use students' understanding of language elements like words, sentences, and paragraphs as a bridge to new concepts of shots, sequences, and paragraphs. In extending metaphor, they build on students' existing knowledge, providing hooks on which students can hang new knowledge they encounter. It seems a simple act to Mark and Nancy, too often instructors overlook how might support student learning by drawing on prior experiences and prior knowledge. The visualization exercise is a very good example of how linking existing ideas with new information facilitates learning. The teachers provide hook, learning occurs when students actively engage in process of making meaning of old and new ideas. But, you may say, Mark admits that language metaphor breaks down in class discussions; so bridge is not quite right, and he and Nancy need to find another. …