TEACHING THOUGHTS #7: JUST-IN-CASE VS JUST-IN-TIME TEACHING

This post is inspired by a reading in one of the advanced books – it might well be English File which has a reading related to animals. Anyway, the reason this comes to mind is because of one of those super useful little glossary boxes at the bottom of a text that helpfully and entirely randomly decides to focus on a couple of words from the text. And in this case, the glossary explains the meaning of stickleback. And you just think to yourself – why?

JUST-IN-CASE TEACHING

We can all this a just-in-case view of teaching and learning because if a student were to ask “Why are you pointing out this word to me?”, the only possible answer is “Well, you never know. Just in case you might need it one day.” It doesn’t matter how improbable this future situation might be. Learners are learning things just on the off chance that it might turn out to be relevant and handy. The central problem with this approach to teaching is that it involves a lot of guesswork and a lot of redundancy – students will learn about things they don’t really care about because they don’t have any personal connection with it.

JUST-IN-TIME TEACHING

In contrast to this, we have the concept of just-in-time teaching and learning. My understanding of what this means is that it is an approach in which students only learn that which meets the communicative needs of the present moment. In other words, we shift from learning things that might be useful later to things that students need to know now. As an example of this, I’ve always felt that when students are doing tasks like writing and they ask you as the teacher for specific guidance on something that this is a very authentic learning moment. Students have a gap in knowledge or understanding and they seek to bridge that gap through inquiry. This is learning that addresses a present need and it’s always much more relevant to the learner.

CONCLUSION

I now try to build my teaching practice entirely around just-in-time principles. My goal is engineer situations through the use of pairwork particularly in which students notice gaps in what they want to say and attempt to address them through inquiry. We have to say in all honesty a coursebook-led approach is just-in-case. Students learn things in case they might be useful whereas I think it’s better to learn things that we all know are useful

So thanks for explaining what a stickleback is but I think there are better things to learn.