Shulman (2005) knew what his signature pedagogy was. He urged us to find ours. For someone teaching in the Education Department, their signature pedagogy would be something like this: Communicating iIdeas, Presenting, Collaborating, Cognitive Development. Lesson Planning, Curriculum Mapping.
In other words, these are the skills your learner will be demonstrating at their future workspace. Lee Shulman defines signature pedagogies as “the types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions” (2005, p. 52). As Shulman explains, a signature pedagogy has three dimensions: surface structure, deep structure, and an implicit structure. You can read this article for more interesting details. Eaton, et.al. (2017), in their study Signature Pedagogies for E-Learning in Higher Education and Beyond describe the surface, deep and implicit structures of signature pedagogy (Shulman, 2005) and how these are implemented in the online learning environment. The authors stress on the need for using signature pedagogy to be built into the online courses to establish faculty expertise, effectiveness in the practical context, and building of a community of inquiry. Signature pedagogy in an online learning environment through the Community of Inquiry Framework helps develop industry-demanded skills in students.
Another type of online learning environment is the mobile learning environment. In their paper, Kearney, et.al. (2015) describe the signature pedagogy implementation in the mobile learning environment by teachers. They particularly focused on the three characteristics of the mobile learning environment: authenticity, collaboration and personalization. All three promote the development of industry relevant skills in students. Training faculty to utilize the mobile learning environment to implement signature pedagogy can be a part of their technology integration program.
From the course design and development standpoint, defining your signature pedagogies can enable you to create authentic teaching and learning activities. This also raises the profile of the faculty as a professional role model, who explains the professional context of the job where the academic skills can be applied. Faculty sharing their published work is also a great example of contextualized professional role-model building.Phrases like Communicating iIdeas, Presenting, Collaborating, Cognitive Development., Lesson Planning, Curriculum Mapping etc, will aid in tweaking and fine-tuning the learning outcomes of your course. Stronger learning outcomes build quality learning experiences. They serve as a guide to find current resources to share with your learners. They also help them visualize their activities in their job-context - a strong motivator in achieving outcomes and mastery.
So, what’s your signature pedagogy?
Feel free to email your instructional designer zmughal@carthage.edu to discuss over a virtual meeting!
Works Cited
Eaton, S. E., Brown, B., Schroeder, M., Lock, J., & Jacobsen, M. (2017).
Signature Pedagogies for E-Learning in Higher Education and Beyond. In Online Submission. Online Submission.
Kearney, M., Burden, K., & Rai, T. (2015). Investigating teachers' adoption of signature mobile pedagogies. Computers & Education, 80, 48-57
Schulman, L. S. (2005). Signature Pedagogies in the Professions. Daedalus, 134 (3), 52-59.
Understanding TIM using Bloom
TIM is a model of technology use. Bloom is a model of learning outcomes. You can learn about the history of Bloom's Taxonomy and other details here.
The Bloom's Taxonomy can be integrated into the TIM table in order to understand the Bloom lower to higher-order learning distributions over TIM. These tables below explain how Bloom is related to TIM. Higher levels of technology integration on the TIM require higher-order thinking (from Bloom) on the part of the students. This information can help us analyze the learning outcomes and associate them with supporting educational technologies. This article on the University of South Florida website provides a good understanding of TIM with Bloom.
Begin with the End in Mind! align your learning outcomes with assessment items using Backward Planning. Please visit this site for more information.
Ask your students how would they like to share their learning, and provide multiple options for assignment submissions:
How can you use Hunter's Model for designing classroom instruction?
Use a combination of these activities for designing the content for your lesson:
To learn more about this model, please visit this site.
To learn more about different teaching models, please view this page.
How to Select an Ed Tech Tool based on a Learning Environment from TIM and the Learning Outcomes from Bloom and the Pedagogy Hexagon
Notice the use of Bloom's Taxonomy keywords: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating aligned with the TIM descriptors. Signature Pedagogy is central to all decisions.
Download the Pedagogy Hexagon here.
Contact your instructional designer at zmughal@carthage.edu to find out the best ed-tech tool for your needs.
If you come across a tool you would like to use in your course, you will find the following rubric useful to evaluate the effectiveness of your selected tool.