Reflexive Pedagogy and Future Assessment

The EIM Global Podcast

Welcome to the EIM Global podcast, the place where we speak to experts in the education sector to help further our own practice.

This is a special episode where EiM's very own Dr Kevin House, Education Future's Architect, takes over the podcast and chats with Professor Bill Cope. The discussion was recorded for a different release but we felt its value as a discussion was important to share and so are re-packaging it in this new way, as part of the EiM Global podcast series.

Bill Cope is a Professor in the Department of Education Policy, Organization & Leadership, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a director of Common Ground Research Networks, a not-for profit organization developing and applying new publishing technologies. His research interests include theories and practices of pedagogy, cultural and linguistic diversity, and new technologies of representation and communication. His recent research has focused on the development of digital writing and assessment technologies, with the support of a number of major grants from the US Department of Education, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation. The result has been the Scholar multimodal writing and assessment environment.

Kevin and Bill discuss the following topics:

• Why does good pedagogy today need to involve a repertoire of approaches – reflexive pedagogy?
• Models of education from traditional transmission models through constructivism, experiential, conceptual and beyond.
• Bloom’s taxonomy, bias towards cognition models of education,
• cognitive load theory and problems with defining learning as long-term memory.
• Is the real cognitive load problem not too much but lack of cognitive load?
• Why students need to be able to regulate cognitive load for themselves, not teachers doing it for them.
• Conventional classroom discourse vs benefits of a technology-enabled approach.
• What does the future of measurement and evidencing student learning look like.
• Why current approaches to assessment are problematic.
• Why so-called formative assessment is often not really formative at all, but actually summative.
• Moving from small data sets to Big Data in assessment practices.
• The value of students being given the data in time to own their own learning trajectory.
• Why data can dissolve the traditional testing approach.
• Credential capital, Benjamin Bloom and why there’s now no excuse for not doing mastery learning.
• Education and the importance of finding purpose.
• Credential ‘stackability’
• What book is Bill currently reading?
• What is Bill listening to?
• What is Bill watching?

EiM Online:

www.eimglobal.com

Professor Bill Cope and Professor Mary Kalantzis's website

New Learning (newlearningonline.com)