Skip to main content

Gesture & Three Point Communication in Curriculum Conversations

Noticing

Open evening provides an interesting opportunity to explore how you explain your subject and your curriculum journey to someone who will often know little about what you do. You will have many opportunities to repeat this explanation over a short period of time as you spend 4 or 5 minutes in conversation with student and parent groupings over a few hours.


I am at pains to point out to you that I never intended to write this blog at all today, but having seen a lot of recent Twitter posts on the topic of gesture and having been reading about three point communication, I could not help but notice my behaviours when I was required to repeat them over and again at this event! Therefore, what I have noticed are two potentially interesting aspects of my usual approach. 


Gesture


I always begin exploring what economics is by explaining that there are not enough resources on the planet to be able to meet everyone’s endless wants, so groups of people must make choices. And that is what we are essentially studying, the choices made by these groups about how to allocate these resources. For example how do we decide which goods and services to produce, and who will get them? 


I then mention that some countries resolve this problem with a command system, like in communist countries, where governments are making all the choices about what to produce and who gets it. As I am saying this, I very often seem to raise my hand to one side, in a sort of ‘on the one hand’ type gesture! 



I then discuss that the alternative would be to use a free market system where these decisions are made using supply, demand and prices, so for example, goods are allocated to those who can pay more for them. My arm now waves across 180 degrees in front of me to illustrate that we have hit the other extreme on the continuum. My arm then tracks back a little. We’re somewhere in between the two in this country. 


The gesture reveals the schema


This gesture externally reveals my internal thinking about this topic. I see these two systems as the extremes, and most of what we study is about the varying degrees within which we operate between these extremes. I typically use a continuum diagram to teach this topic in the first few lessons of Year 12.


Three Point Communication


I then move onwards to point students’ and parents’ attention to my graphic which will help me explain our curriculum content and sequence. 




Eye contact for all of us is now directed towards the graphic as I am pointing to the market section, where we begin our studies. I then continue pointing and explaining through the nation, firm and global journey that we take. 


This is the first time I have used such a graphic on open evening and I found the three point approach really helped me to explain and engage. I also found the graphic helped overcome transience and enabled interested parties to explore further and ask questions as they wished.


Why the graphic?


I created a version of this graphic previously as part of my curriculum thinking work and due to my desire to clearly communicate my curriculum content and sequencing to all stakeholders (see my blogs on these issues here and here). 


Initial feedback from non-economics students on my red design was that it was full of words that people who had not studied the subject could not understand! So this version has been deliberately simplified to enable subject novices (although assuming some general knowledge) to appreciate what will be involved. I am also using this with my new Year 12 students to help give them an idea of the big picture of the curriculum journey we are embarking upon. 


What are you revealing? What are you sharing?


So, I wonder what your repeated open evening gestures are revealing about your curriculum thinking? And I also wonder whether you will consider the idea of graphically mapping your subject to be useful in creating a tool for curriculum communication?


I would love to hear your thoughts! 




  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is ChatGPT? And what do educators need to know about it?

After registering on the ChatGPT website you are taken to a browser page. You can type in any question you like, and you will be provided with an answer. That’s what ChatGPT offers. It is a ‘chatbot’ and it is currently operating in a free ‘research phrase’ to collect feedback from users.   Great, isn’t that what Google does? ChatGPT is not a search engine - it is text only and it won’t pull information from elsewhere on the internet. It will give you answers using only the large body of content which it has been fed, so it does not know ‘everything’ and cannot address questions about current or future events. It does converse in a more ‘human’ manner than Google though, it’s maybe best thought of as a quiet, somewhat bookish, Alexa.  Why should I care? Home Study The content provided by ChatGPT appears to be of a much higher quality and far more specific than students could typically obtain from the internet via search engines. Users can obtain everything from compositio
Post a Comment
Read more

Back to the Future

Ensuring something happens in the future is potentially rather easier to achieve if you possess a time machine. In theory such a contraption facilitates your travel back in time to amend things that are wrong with the present before they happen, or enables you to leap forwards to tweak moments in the future for the better. However, as Marty and Doc humorously demonstrate, this isn’t always as simple as it might seem! For the rest of us non-time-machine-owning folk, our main hope for ensuring things happen in the future lies in the effectiveness of our ‘prospective memory’. As opposed to ‘retrospective memory’ (where we are trying to remember something from the past), the concept of prospective memory refers to our ability to remember something in the future. Will you remember to wish Lucy a happy birthday tomorrow morning? Will you remember to send Jack to the office at 12.20pm for their appointment? Will you put out the garden waste bin instead of the food waste bin next week? T
Post a Comment
Read more

Subject Symmetry

Some subjects appear to be awash with books on how to teach them and writing on what constitutes a ‘good’ curriculum in terms of that subject. Wise subject leaders who are engaged in curriculum design would of course do well to read such material to help aid their thinking, as would senior leaders who are responsible for quality assurance.   But what if little or nothing appears to have been written about the teaching of or curriculum thinking in relation to a particular subject? Where does a subject leader go for inspiration? How do they know if their curriculum is any ‘good’ or how it could be improved? How might senior leaders attempt to quality assure that curriculum?  The answer is that the curriculum thinking must be done from scratch. Before any work can be started the parties involved need first to educate themselves in the underlying principles and concepts of curriculum theory. These generic principles then need to be tentatively applied to the subject. There is no other w
Post a Comment
Read more