Mathew Baker

E-Portfolio

Pedagogy & Assessment

Pedagogy is the ‘art and science of teaching’, consisting of the content that we teach and the methods of doing so in which teachers engage.
To measure the effectiveness of these teaching strategies, assessment is critical to ascertain an indication of the level of understanding students are achieving, allowing teachers to adopt more functional teaching strategies to enable greater levels of learning if need be.

Evidence & Justification

As part of my first practicum, An Introduction to Professional Development, The school required me to attend a staff development day at Bathurst focusing on Effective Pedagogy and Quality Teaching. The seminar broadened my conceptualisation of pedagogy and emphasised the its importance, as is suggested in A Classroom Practice Guide, ‘Pedagogy treats knowledge as something that requires active construction and requires students to engage in higher-order thinking and to communicate substantively about what they are learning’ (NSW Dept. of Education and Training, p.11).

For my next example of pedagogy and assessment, I will again draw on my first practicum, An Introduction to Professional Development, to example my understanding of pedagogy and assessment. During my practicum, my associate teacher set me the task of reading the students a book entitled ‘Two Feet’ and teaching the sound of ‘ee’. To assess my pedagogical methods of teaching, I was also required to design a comprehension sheet about the sound. This is exampled in the link below.

Work sheet

As assessment is essential to measure the effectiveness of pedagogical methods, such was the assessment of the comprehension sheet I designed to measure the levels of learning experienced by the students from my pedagogical practices. The results were effective.

As another component of my Language as a Social Practice subject, two fellow students and myself were required to act out a children’s book as part of a readers theatre presentation. We elected to act out the book ‘Soldier, Soldier, Wont You Marry Me’. The presentation has altered my methods of pedagogy in the sense that acting out a presentation as such, to the effect of learning the book off by heart and detailing my understanding of the text far greater than had I simply read it, I feel that presentations to the class in such exercises as readers theatre, are effective pedagogy in making the student’s learn.