It is my goal to be an engaging and motivating teacher by providing learners with appropriate and relevant learning situations and scaffolding their development in these situations. By appropriate and relevant, I mean a learning situation which is neither a minimally guided environment in which learners must construct information for themselves, nor an environment with direct instructional guidance that fully explains the concepts and procedures the learners are required to learn (see Kirschner et al., 2006 for a discussion). Rather, the objective is to strike a balance between these two extremes.

My task, as a teacher, is to take my point of departure in the learners’ existing knowledge level and skill set, and to scaffold their development from that point onwards. In other words, it is not my job to ensure that every learner achieves the highest mark; but to optimise the learner’s potential based on his or her existing skills, knowledge, and level of motivation.

I began my teaching career in informal learning contexts. The general consensus in the research community at this time was that informal learning environments could not engender measurable cognitive learning outcomes (cf. Falk & Dierking, 2000). This seemed a both disappointing and un-ambitious state of affairs to me, and probably prompted me to be a bit over-ambitious in my teaching efforts. However, these efforts did give me a sense of which teaching approaches and devices could promote both affective and cognitive outcomes in informal contexts.

Later, this sense served me well, as I began teaching in formalised contexts. After my experience with the course Introduction to University Pedagogy, where I designed a rudimentary Didactical Situation (cf. Brousseau, 1997) on the biological subject of phylogenetic trees, I realised that the characteristics of appropriate and relevant learning situations in formal versus informal contexts might have much in common. Since then, I have always attempted to approach the teaching points I wished to make in a way that would make those points intrinsically motivating to the learners, much as I attempted in the informal settings where I began. This entails using visual aids and objects as much as possible, creating intriguing situations, and thinking carefully about the setting-in-scene of the core concepts to be learned.

Brousseau, G. (1997). Theory of didactical situations in mathematics. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Falk, J. H. & Dierking, L. D. (2000). Learning from museums: visitor experiences and the making of meaning. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira press.

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86.