Transcript:
Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with any of your colleagues who you think might benefit from it. Let’s talk today about complexity and simplicity. So, I think you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by carefully planning a session based on the complexity or simplicity of the argument that you’re trying to convey to your students.
It’s really important that we don’t stress the content of what we’re delivering. Rather the interrelationships of what it is we’re talking about or teaching about. Whether that’s a conceptual relationship, it might be a timeline. It might be a cause and effect, relationship, whatever the relationship is, whatever conceptually encapsulates the knowledge that’s being shared.
So, if you plan your lesson, it’ll depend a little bit on the nature of the discipline and the level which you’re teaching. But I think generally it’s quite a good idea to outline the complex picture as briefly as possible as a target that students are going to aim for, but rather than then try and make that your starting point and try and explore that you basically want to go right back to the beginning to the most simple building blocks of that complexity and build your way forward.
I think the reason to do that is it’s very easy sometimes to make assumptions that students have had the same life experiences you, or that they actually have the same linguistic ability, terminologies. That they understand the jargon, and there’s a real danger that you can trip over yourself.
If you start from a complex try and go to simple, you need to basically start with simple and build up. It’s really important to make sure that if you do think there is discipline jargon to be shared, that has to be unpicked and built into the session, put up definitions alongside any jargon that you’re using.
So, I think it’s really important just to situate the complexity of the topic in their, in the student’s, landscape of learning, not in your own. And it’s very often, the case is that we almost, it’s not about showing off, but sometimes we literally just kind of feel that we need to start with what we’re most comfortable with, which is sometimes a very advanced level of knowledge.
So, it’s really important to just plan out your session in advance. I use a mind map to do that. I usually have a map sometimes on paper, sometimes using a bit of software that allows me. Map out the journey from simplicity to complexity. And when I do that, I can share that with my students as well.
You might want to try that, see how it goes. Please share like, and follow be well.
