Teaching Practical Skills - Responding to Online Learning in Times of Need

This paper explores the use of video as a teaching tool utilising mistakes-based pedagogy.

Digital technology has had, and continues to have, substantial impact on education and learning, now more than ever in this new COVID19 impacted educational environment.

These new teaching and learning technologies make possible the ‘anywhere, anytime’ delivery, but we need to acknowledge that teaching practical skills online can be difficult for both teachers and learners.

While face-to-face classroom teaching enables encouragement, relationship building and flexibility to help and support students to master skills during practical classes, online tutorials lack that personal observation and support if things do not go to plan. Making mistakes is the norm for many students, especially during skill-based activities.

As [1] suggests, if students take time to engage in mistakes and use them as a part of a discovery process, student engagement can increase, and they move into a deeper level of understanding. In a schooling context, little or no mistakes generally indicates something was well learnt. The more mistakes made often reflected lower grades.

This can trigger negative emotions like anger and fear or embarrassment, resulting in potential learning from those mistakes being lost and students to give up.

To enhance mistakes in learning, [1] proposes that they need to be thought of as a part of the pedagogic process, suggesting that when incorporated and accepted into the learning process, mistakes and responses to them become an important problem-solving mechanism.

Mistakes Based Video Pedagogy (MBVP) is a strategy that can engage and motivate students to actively participate in their learning to successfully gain practical skills.

This is a teaching strategy I developed for teaching fashion student’s construction skills, based on a student-centred learning approach.

The key pedagogical perspectives are the use of video as a teaching tool, modelling common mistakes and their remedies within the demonstrations.

This paper draws on experiences and observations by the researcher-as-participant, in addition to student participants. A study undertaken as part of my Master’s dissertation (2017) assessed the use of MBVP in a face-to face classroom context.

The current paper considers the learnings from this project and the valuable role pedagogy offers in facing unforeseen challenges, such as those inflicted by the COVID-19 closure of our higher education campuses.

In this current environment and the next generation classroom to come, it is imperative we explore other strategies and teaching tools for practical skill acquisition to be delivered completely online.

I believe MBVP to be one such strategy, that can help mitigate issues which will inevitably arise and give students more confidence to proceed. How this is done is the subject of this paper.
 

References

Simon, A.M. (2020). Teaching practical skills - responding to online learning in times of need. In L. Gómez Chova, A. López Martínez & I. Candel Torres(Eds.), EDULEARN20 Proceedings (pp.7050-7056). Spain: IATD. https://library.iated.org/view/SIMON2020TEA