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How Dyslexia Saved Me from a Fate Worse than Rote Learning
This guest post by Assoc Prof Ian Dixon from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information reflects on integrating structured mastery learning with improvisational just-in-time teaching. Through examples and lesson plans, Prof Dixon shares how fluidly combining these approaches can lead to powerful ‘magic moments’ of deep learning. He advocates comprehensive knowledge of material, clear objectives, and improvisation based on students’ needs. For instructors seeking to enhance engagement, this post offers a thought-provoking perspective on blending complementary techniques.
There are two concepts I hold dear as a teacher. Alas, they are mutually contradictory. But the clash between them produces some of the magic moments that I deeply value in class. Those moments when you feel that the students ‘get it’, really ‘get’ the internal nature of the material you are teaching. Those two concepts are:
- The Madeline Hunter Model of Mastery Learning (MHM) and
- Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT)
The first, The Hunter Model, is a highly structured approach to creative lesson plans which allows student-centred learning in a guided environment that becomes almost invisible to the student (or at least that is how I understand it).
MHM is opposite to the second concept – JiTT: a free-flowing response to the ‘flipped classroom’, meaning that when a student shows interest in a subject you throw all your improvisatory attention to that learning curve immediately. Often this is based on the subjects that students have self-directed themselves toward learning more about before the class begins, but sometimes it occurs organically within the class you are teaching.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the MGM principles, but let me be more specific. The Hunter model for creating lesson plans involves:
- Anticipatory Set
- Objective and Purpose
- Input
- Modelling
- Checking for Understanding
- Guided Practice
- Independent Practice
- Closure
Over the years, however, I have found that the following model works best for me:
- Motivation
- Mental Set
- Objective
- Input
- Modelling
- Practice
- Checking
I have included several MHM-inspired lesson plans below in accordance with this model. You will see it is not for the faint-hearted. The teacher must be brave and embrace uncertainty. It helps to keep a mental checklist of what has been covered in class so far – especially as this is not a template for linear delivery.
On the other hand, according to Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000), Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) is a technique where ‘students do pre-class activity, submit responses to this activity, and then the instructor uses these responses to tailor class to the specific needs of the students’.
Madeline Hunter (MHM)
While Leslie Owen Wilson (2023) (no relation to the Hollywood comedian, unfortunately) questions the validity of Dr Hunter’s approach in a modern educational context, I believe it can be applied in a most creative fashion. What’s more, the juxtaposition of both techniques in a single class can be magical – provided one understands the principles of JiTT.
If I think of my early career as a tertiary teacher some 20 years ago (and honestly I shudder at the mistakes I made back then), I recall how JiTT came quite naturally to me – in the form of PAnIc! So much so that it started to look a little more like ADHD than JiTT. I still remember the students’ faces looking up at me like ‘what the hell is going on?’ The class involved too much information, too many tangents, not enough practical application, and all based on an abiding principle: sheer PAnIc!
But like all things, one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. In this case, the baby was the fluid ability to negotiate around pools of knowledge which relied on a ‘deep learning’ principle. That is, knowing your material backwards. The oh-so-soapy bathwater, of course, equated to the sheer bamboozlement I had created in the minds of my students. While I could justify this as a creative tease for them to find their own path, I believe structuring the lesson according to Hunter’s principle is what makes JiTT work at its most effective.
Ironically these were principles I learned a decade after I began teaching.
One of the first principles of Hunter’s approach is the statement of objective: let the students know what it is they’ve come here to learn. In further development of the Hunter model scholars have suggested that a motivation for what that class objective is will underpin the learning process.
Here is an example (I absolutely love this).
When I was 8 years old, I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker. But getting my hands on a Super-8 camera proved impossible. I had to wait until I was 17 before I managed to get a VHS camera and make my first film. Man, it was awesome! But, of course, in a modern world, children have access to cameras before they even know how to speak.
That is not the example, of course; it’s just a preamble. This is the example:
Unfortunately for students of the contemporary era, they think that knowing how to point, shoot and edit is all that filmmaking comes down to. Not so. It is a discipline. It is a vocation. It is a talent and nobody knew this more than the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon; The Seven Samurai).
I read his biography “Something of an Autobiography” (which anyone serious about filmmaking should read).
In the book, the master filmmaker Kurosawa tells anecdotes to illustrate his relation to film including this little gem:
Approaching the end of his life after nearly 90 years on earth, 60 of which were dedicated to filmmaking, he declared that he was almost beginning to understand what filmmaking was all about. That is profound! Every genuine filmmaker should go into the process of making films thinking they know nothing. And when one becomes complacent in their practice, they have faltered as a filmmaker. So, I begin my lessons by saying to postmillennial students who believe they already know about film, screenwriting and media, that we should take a pause and think about how much we don’t know!
If Kurosawa can make 50 films as an acknowledged master of cinema… and still think there is more to learn, then so should we (with that, I include myself and the students in one inclusive bundle known as the not-Kurosawas).
So having established this motivation I then introduce the objective according to the Hunter model: to understand that cinema should emerge from life and not from regurgitating other forms of postmodern cinema. That cinema means lifelong learning.
Okay, so I then continue on to illustrate the importance of what they have learned already AND the importance of their own pursuits so far. That’s called the mental set and it also allows the students to build upon previous knowledge and have the confidence to know that their own accumulated knowledge has been beneficial as well. Sounds like ‘deep learning’? You bet!
Then we get down to the nitty gritty: the input, which is the essence of the research material they need to learn about. Remembering of course that this is where MHM meets JiTT – because the class comes in with a different level of understanding of the principles you wish to teach. Some have already mastered them. Others need more practice, which is why the practical component is so important. Note that practice as the vital ‘learn by doing’ component of MHM requires the teacher to plan for some pretty shrewd games, exercises, examples, food for analysis, and think-pair-share opportunities. You can see more examples of this below, and this is where the teacher can get really creative. The examples below might not make total sense given the note-taking involved, but you get the idea; only you need to understand your own hieroglyphics:
CS4319 LESSON PLAN WEEK 1 V1
MOTIVATION
-
- Has story outgrown its old forms?
- What remains true of story through ALL media?
- Conflict in story!
MENTAL SET
-
- Three Act Structure
- Protagonist vs. Antagonist
- => Transformation
OBJECTIVE
-
- To convince students that modern storytelling is as deep as it is free associative
- Transmedia is a single story told over various media.
- Transmedia is the FUTURE of INDUSTRY!
- THIS IS A PRACTICAL and THEORETICAL COURSE:
- you will be expected to participate in group discussion & practical work
INPUT
-
- Branding!
- Transmedia Definition
- Learning Outcomes & Course Content
- INDUSTRY notes!
- Assessments
- Jenkins: Convergence Culture
- Tsivian: 3 Internet visionaries
MODELLING
-
- Using & transforming feelings/experiences into stories
PRACTICE
-
- Exercise #1: (Discussion) [Think Pair Share]:
- What’s your Favourite Platform/Media?
- MOST EFFECTIVE for Transmedia?
- Begin ORGANISING GROUPS – STUDENT to SCRIBE
- Exercise #2: (Analysis) Can you beat Skins & El Barco?
- What works, what doesn’t and why?
- Exercise #3 & 4: (Create) Brainstorm
- Exercise #5: (Experience) PITCH (transmedia story idea)
- Exercise #6: (Create)
- Collect random images from Net
- Weave together to ‘tell a story’
- Exercise #7: I wanna go/I wanna stay
- Exercise #8: Low Budget Transmedia
- Exercise #1: (Discussion) [Think Pair Share]:
CHECKING
-
- What is Transmedia Storytelling?
- 3 things you learned today?
CS2300 LESSON PLAN WEEK 8 V2
OPENING!
-
- What overcomes an actor’s self-consciousness on camera?
- What makes a character?
- ACTOR gains confidence through character!
MENTAL SET
-
- Chekhovian/Stanislavskian/Fine-ian Performance
OBJECTIVE
-
- Character provides antidote to the naked actor’s self-consciousness
INPUT
-
- Stanislavsky
- Howard Fine
- Chekhov:
- Psych Gesture
- Radiating
- Sustaining
- Status exercises
MODELLING
-
- What worked what didn’t and why?
PRACTICE
-
- Exercise #1: (Analysis Pairs) Highlight Opinions – any SCRIPT
- Exercise #2: (Analysis) Review of directed scene – Rosemary’s Baby
-
- Exercise #3: (Experience):
- Build a character today – 3 Key Modes:
- Stanislavsky (done)
- Fine 8 STEPS
- Chekhov…
- Build a character today – 3 Key Modes:
- Exercise #3: (Experience):
-
- Exercise #4: (Experience):
- Kinaesthetic Warmups
- Psychological Gesture
- Radiation & Sustaining
- Status Games:
- 5 numbers
- Wink Murder
- One walks into Group
- Exercise #5: (Reflection):
- What worked (for YOU) what didn’t and why?
- Exercise #4: (Experience):
CHECKING
-
- How do you limit self-consciousness in your actors?
- Do characters allow the actor to HIDE?
-
- Three things you learned today?
So where does JiTT enter the equation? That’s easier said than done. Once the students have located what it is they need to learn outside the classroom, based on their own filmmaking practice and their own inquiry, the teacher needs to implement that. For industry knowledge, academic knowledge, speculative knowledge all form a confluence of ideas and experiences, even anecdotes, to fill the classroom with life. In my life as a professional actor, indeed as a teacher, I discovered this book which is the best advice on JiTT I have ever found:
Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers (Routledge, 1999)
And in the spirit of that improvisation, which is necessary for mastery as a teacher, I highlight the following chapter also:
Grahame Weinbren, Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story (2003), 126-146. Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story (sckool.org)
Weinbren’s approach to Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories is nothing short of inspirational.
On that note, you might be asking: ‘what have MHM and JiTT got to do with ChatGPT?’ And I am glad you asked. As far as I can see, it demonstrates through the modelling process that a story is never as good when applied through machine learning as it is in the truly associative mind of the creative student. As the great Professor Rajalingam recently expressed the matter: ‘if ChatGPT can generate a better story than you can… then you’ve got problems!’
Maybe in the future generative AI will develop to such an extent that it can tell stories as effectively as humans, and throw associative JiTT at students based on MHM principles, but it’s a long way from the reality of ChatGPT yet.
There is much more to say about applications of teaching through neurological perspectives on stories, but for now, I hope this little blend of two different teaching and learning modalities has let the whistle blow for you to experiment. Oh, and by the way (in true JiTT style), while the above filmmaking example is very practical, I have found over the decades that it is of equal relevance to pure academia. In fact, I have applied the principles described above in my teaching on cultural studies, film analysis, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Once again, know your subject backwards and feel free to improvise upon what you know. You will always have the MHM list right beside you as a checklist to make sure you have taught everything in the lesson plan for that week. I hope this approach will be as inspirational for you as it has been for me over the decades.
Here are some more resources:
Madeline Hunter Lesson Plan Model
How to Use Just-in-Time Teaching
