Ambition

What

Reconstruction of regular teaching by reversing and omission is not a simple trick. It is a way of thinking about teaching you can vary endlessly and it enables you to continuously expand your educational repertoire.

In order to map out your own learning path as a teacher, you first have to be aware what you are currently doing and why. Based on this, you may then wish to expand your repertoire step by step building on what you already know and are able to, again and again. We developed an interview method with which you can map in pairs each other's goal system in a short time (half an hour), f.i. with your colleague.

Why

Expanding an educational repertoire is best done step by step, building on what you already are able to and want to do. This could prevent both frustration and boredom.

Designing a learning route starts by mapping out what you usually do and why you think to be important. This could be clearly and compactly displayed in a goal system.

A goal system can easily be constructed on the basis of an interview. A supervisor, f.i. the didactic counselor could interview the teacher, but it is also very instructive and insightful for the teacher to map out the goal system of his supervisor. For an interview you only need an A3 paper and a stack of post-it leaflets. The interview is as follows:

How

Designing a learning path starts by mapping out what you usually do and why you find it important. This can be clearly and compactly displayed in a goal system.

A goal system can easily be constructed on the basis of an interview. The didactic counselor interviews the teacher, but it is also very instructive and insightful for the teacher to map out the goal system of his supervisor. For the interview you only need an A3 paper and a stack of post-it leaflets. The interview developed as follows:

The interviewer asks the teacher to take in mind a representative lesson and asks the following question: What do you do successively in such a lesson? The interviewer writes each part of a lesson on a separate post-it sheet, in the words of the teacher

The interviewer asks the question for each lesson part: Why do you think this is important? These answers (goals) should be literally written on post-it sheets as well and pasted onto the A3 sheet. A lesson component could contribute to multiple goals. These relationships between goals and means are represented by connecting with an arrow the lesson component to one (or more) goal(s). For each purpose the interviewer asks why the teacher considers this goal important, until the teacher has 'arrived' at his most important goals for teaching.

Finally, the interviewer asks the teacher to evaluate his goal system based on the following question: With the realisation of which goals are you satisfied and about which goals are you less satisfied? The goals get a white (satisfied) and grey (not yet satisfied) color respectively.

Example

Below we represent the goal system of biology teacher Ilse