Category Archives: 2.1 Curriculum

2.1 Curriculum, 3.4 Professional Reflection and Communication

My first few weeks at UWS

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During the first couple of weeks at UWS I have been enjoying starting all the different classes that are incorporated within my course. Beforehand, I was the most confident about starting literacy, as English was my favourite subject at school; therefore I felt like this module was where I could contribute to a high degree and share a lot of knowledge within.  Overall I was most nervous about starting Spanish as I have never studied it before, therefore I was hesitant as to what level of difficulty this particular module would be like. However, after looking at all the course handbooks for each module I quickly realised the courses are all set out nicely and easy to follow, this allowed me to look ahead and see what was going to be covered within the next few weeks.   Being able to do this put me at ease as the unknown of what each module would be like was the issue that was worrying me the most.

However, as I am onto my fourth week I am finding all my modules equally understandable and enjoyable.  I am feeling a lot more confident about Spanish as I have realised all the people in my class are also beginners to the subject, therefore we are all in the same position and learning together.  Although literacy was the module I felt most confident about beginning, I have realised every module is preparing me for all the different aspects of becoming a primary teacher, so although I am still confident in literacy, I am also feeling more confident in all the other modules as well.  Due to all of this, in the future going onto my second, third and fourth year of the course I will remind myself that there is no point in feeling anxious over modules that I haven’t even explored yet, as by the end of the year they could end up being the module I find most enjoyable overall.

2.1 Curriculum, Literacy

Situated Communication Independent Study/Reading Task

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Within chapter five of the ‘Finding out about others: the skill of questioning’ book by Hargie (2011) it explores the importance of questions, as they are incorporated within a lot of interpersonal encounters.  There are many different sections within this chapter, such as ‘Purposes of questions’, ‘Probing questions’ and ‘Types of questions.’ Under the section ‘Purposes of questions’ it gives a range of different examples in which questions are used, for example – teachers when teaching their class and sales workers trying to pitch to members of the public.  The ‘Probing questions’ section discusses how questions can be used to prompt people to reply to what others have asked them.  The ‘Types of questions’ section goes into a large amount of detail about recall and process questions, affective questions, leading questions and open and closed questions.  Research mentioned during this section is (Dickson et al, 1997), in which they concluded during counselling that open questions are more effective.  They backed up this evidence with three bullet points which state their opinion such as, open questions produce accurate responses.  However, personally I don’t completely agree with this statement as I feel as though every question type is effective in different ways.  To back up my feelings about this, I think more research should be done to strengthen their argument that open questions are more effective, as I do not think it is fair to just include one source of research from the same kind of environment.

There are also some arguments within this chapter, especially under the ‘Multiple questions’ section, as it starts off by mentioning that multiple questions can be useful in certain circumstances, however it then talks about how they are “wasteful.”  The word wasteful is then indicating that multiple questions are useful at no point in time – this completely contradicting what was said to start with.  I personally found the first paragraph of the chapter beneficial as it made me grasp the concept of just how important questions are, as one teacher portrayed this through a learning experience.  During a lesson she made a rule that nobody was allowed to ask a question, however she quickly realised communication was vague after that, and the children ended up asking questions unintentionally.

 

References:

‘Finding out about others: the skill of questioning’, in Hargie, O. (2011) Skilled Interpersonal Communication: Research, Theory and Practice. 5th ed. London: Routledge.