The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
- You’re doing it wrong.
- Seven types of ambiguity and new literacies
- Wednesday Wisdom #10: Application and ability
- HOWTO: Create iTunes audiobooks from MP3s
- #uppingyourgame: an audio preview
- Things I Learned This Week – #10
- How I put together ‘Things I Learned This Week’ [visualization]
- Escaping the circus.
- Ten big questions for education
- Wednesday Wisdom #9: Life is a warfare against malice.
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The Teacher as DJ
4 CommentsI love metaphors. I think they’re a great way at getting a handle on new and difficult concepts and useful for gaining a new perspective on familiar ones. That’s why I found the metaphor of the ‘teacher as DJ’ over at the Iterating Toward Openness blog so interesting. (of course it also helps that it makes teaching sound �cool�) (h) Have a look at some of the things the author compares:
Teacher – DJ
Resources – Records & Samples
Syllabus/SoW – Playlist
Leading Discussion – Beatmatching
He talks of both teacher and DJ ‘blending material in interesting ways’ in ‘discrete blocks of time’ making ‘connections between the resources they choose to employ’. The best bit of the metaphor, however, comes when he says:
Clubbers vote with their feet, and generally do so very overtly. Learners vote with their attention, and generally do so very covertly. How do we, as teachers, ‘keep the dance floor full?’ A skilled DJ can feel the energy coming off a crowd and respond very quickly when that group is starting to feel restless (and starting to abandon the dance floor). A skilled teacher can feel the energy coming off a class and respond very quickly when that group is starting to get restless (and starting to doodle, read books, play games on their cell phones, etc.). The DJ responds by playing different music, sticking with genres that the crowd likes. How does the teacher respond? By using different examples, sticking with the kinds of explanations that the learners resonate with? By understanding the rhythm of the class, by knowing when to ‘play a slow song?’
I’m not saying that we should always pander to the wishes of pupils and the latest fads, but he’s certainly onto something when he makes reference to using different ‘records’ (i.e. teaching styles, resources, activities) to keep the dance floor alive (keep pupils interested/stop them from bouncing off the walls). I suppose there’s three main skills to being a DJ which have their teaching-related analogue:
1. Building up a music collection (Teacher: having a ‘toolkit’ of resources and activities)
2. Having the technical skills and knowledge of tracks to beatmatch and link music together (Teacher: using knowledge and understanding of a topic to link concepts and ideas together)
3. Gaining a ‘feel’ for the dancefloor to know which track to play next (Teacher: gauging the mood/attention level of the class and being flexible enough to change it or work with it)
Published on January 4, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
4 Responses to “The Teacher as DJ”
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Excellent posting. I love this idea and am now going to post that quote on my DJ mate’s blog.
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Another metaphor by Foster (Paradigms and Promises) that I came across when I was researching for my organizational change MA essay:
Imagine that you’re either the referee, coach, player, or spectator at an unconventional soccer match: the field for the game is round; there are several goals scattered haphazardly around the circular field; people can enter and leave the game whenever they want to; they can throw balls in whenever they want; they can say “that’s my goal” whenever they want to, as many times as they want to, and for as many goals as they want to; the entire game takes place on a sloped field; and the game is played as if it makes sense… If you now substitute in that example principals for referees, teachers for coaches, students for players, parents for spectators, and schooling for soccer, you have an equally unconventional depiction of school organizations.
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[...] It brings up the question of how we are training students to find, process and retain information. Having to deal with so much information requires a different approach to the traditional trawls through encyclopedias, books, journals, etc. The teacher, as I mentioned in another post, can be seen to be like a DJ – building a collection, selecting, and mixing for a particular ‘audience’. Will Richardson also discusses this and, with the upcoming Martin Luther King day links to this playlist on MLK’s speeches. It’s a flexible approach meaning that teachers can pick and choose, ‘mixing’ different clips together for their particular classes. [...]
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