[arjie]

What I would like very much is a 'runbook' of techniques in pedagogy. I've read a couple of the books in the space hoping for something and it seems like all of them have philosophical content. The Intentional Teacher is generally pretty good with motivating examples and underlying theory but I'm just looking for a large number of techniques. If anyone has things to share on this front I'd appreciate hearing.

I imagine some kind of teacher training handbook or something. I'm pretty good with rote practice and mechanical repetition, so if there is a list out there of "in case of X, do Y" I will be able to memorize it. Do share if you know what I'm talking about.

[tuukkah]

Practical pedagogy is called didactics and primary school teachers (should) learn a lot of it: after all, a child's brain is still quite undeveloped and you cannot teach them like you would teach a peer or yourself. E.g. you cannot teach grammar rules but you can teach a foreign language through singing, learning games etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didactic_method

These approaches work for most children most of the time, but when they don't, you have special education teachers who have a different degree in diagnosing (debugging) learning difficulties big and small as well as implementing interventions etc. The service they provide is also called remedial education [and it's especially cool when a primary school teacher and a special education teacher work in a big classroom together, the latter immediately bringing back to speed anyone who grasped something slower than the others]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedial_education

[arjie]

Knowing the keyword is quite useful. Thank you. Do you know of a teacher handbook like what I mentioned?

[tuukkah]

I don't know if there's a book literally like that, because the topic spans multiple university degrees and you should have the theoretical background to recognize situation X as well as to apply intervention Y. Even small children's brains are very complex and yet they lack the self-awareness, reflection and communication skills that would help the teacher in "debugging" the (potentially entangled) issues.

I had a look around for resources in English and this site seems highly valuable in math and in general: https://www.understood.org/en/topics/math

[arjie]

Thank you!

[tuukkah]

By coincidence, I came across this old book today: "2000 Tips for Teachers” https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/97813157825...

[mjburgess]

Teaching requires simulating the thought process and emotional state of learners. And then modelling the appropriate thought process to them, repairing their misunderstanding, and managing their cognitive load and other emotions.

Outside of relatively narrow domains, I'm not sure a runbook makes any sense here. People are not, in this sense, machines.

[arjie]

Thank you for responding. My experience is different. A friend of mine shared an anecdote of his daughter not differentiating between two of something and three of something. Her grandfather, visiting from far away, is a child psychologist and after a short while with her and the right methods she reliably did so. The methods themselves weren't magic or highly tuned. They were actually a selection from a recipe book of techniques he had developed over decades of experience. It struck me that this must be trainable.

My experience with most things that appear to require holistic knowledge is that techniques do work. It's why education is scalable: you cannot reliably identify hundreds of thousands of individuals capable of modeling learners reliably. Teacher training programs do improve outcomes by training teachers on techniques.

Identifying the right techniques that work across humans is obviously very hard, but we have found quite a few. We know that 'phonics' works better for reading than 'guess the word', as an example.

People do behave mechanically in many ways. The game of basketball is not mechanical, but the training that makes the best players has many mechanical aspects. My wife is an artist and her work isn't mechanical, but gaining mastery over painting has a massive amount of mechanical work. My experience is that almost all things that appear to require some kind of gestalt comprehension have sub-components that can be mechanized.

In any case, The Intentional Teacher mentions quite a few. An obvious one from the first few pages is that children have more complex play in a sufficiently small space which they can fully model. It may seem obvious, but also obvious is the counter-version of "children have more complex play when they have unlimited space and a large number of novel things to work with". But only one of these obvious things is true. Hence, I'm looking for more such "rules of learning" so to speak.

[tuukkah]

Another useful keyword might be "patterns": https://teachingpatterns.org/ https://learning-patterns.com/ https://www.jeckstein.com/pedagogical-patterns/

[mjburgess]

Yes, its quite different for primary education