Earlier this summer I gave a talk with the above title to the Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI) conference. It was not a seriously researched talk more a before dinner talk but it did raise some serious issues. I was largely reflecting on my experience as a teacher as a learner and as an examiner and on my observations on other teachers learners and examiners and musing on the interaction between the three aspects - indeed the full title of the talk was Teaching Learning and Assessment: Mutually Exclusive Ideologies.
Since the talk was given to teachers at the school level it is not appropriate to reproduce it in this newsletter. Even so the issues raised are as real in Higher Education as they are in school so here are some thoughts which I hope will provoke discussion and action.
We get a different viewpoint of the educational process whether we start from teaching learning or assessment. In broad categories:
- Teaching: emphasises what lecturers do;
- Learning emphasises what the students do;
- Assessment emphasises what students can show they know.
