IN 425 WORDS...
- "Teaching Teaching & Understanding Understanding" is a 20-minute award-winning short-film about teaching at university and higher-level educational institutions. The film looks at higher-level education from three different perspectives; the student's perspective, the teacher's perspective, and the perspective towards the subject matter being taught and learned. Finally, all these insights are integrated - and the film presents one of the most important insights from research in the area of teaching/learning; namely, "Constructive Alignment" (developed by John Biggs).
- In the film, we follow two prototypical student strategies, personified as "Susan" and "Robert", who have very different motivations for being at university. Susan is internally motivated - and attends university in order to learn exciting new things and skills. Robert is externally motivated - and his goal is, not necessarily to learn, but to pass exams, get a degree, and get a decent job. We follow the two students (student strategies) through their endeavors at university and the film traces them through the three perspectives of the film (mentioned earlier).
- In addition to presenting "models of students" on which teachers may act, the film also presents a categorization of different types of teachers according to their main teaching focus, presents taxonomical models of different cognitive levels of understanding (with concrete examples), looks at how we humans acquire new knowledge and competences, and how to use all this to understand concretely what a teacher can do in order to make sure both types of students actually learn what he or she wants them to.
- The genre of the film is "edutainment" - a contraction of EDU(cation) and (enter)TAINMENT: with primary emphasis on the EDU part; however, the film employs substantial and carefully dosed portions of humour in order to engage the viewer, to provoke reflection, and to make it a joy to watch.
- The film is already in use by teaching/learning units at various universities and institutions around the world, for teaching teaching to new teachers - and to "upgrade" and provide a theoretical foundation for experienced teachers. The film is primarily intended for educational development units and for teachers, but students will also take away valuable insights and knowledge from it (which may positively impact their learning behavior).
- We expect the film to have the strongest impact when used in a learning context. It is excellent for "big-screen presentation" as a basis for and to start a debate about teaching.
The DVD includes a menu and subtitles in the following seven languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, and Danish.
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DVD Cover: Jørgen Sparre
