Teaching via TikTok dance ?!

Part of my plan for 2023

I used ‘retrieval practice’ of key concepts all year long, with a class of committed year 12 students and they didn’t all learn them. 

So, as the year crested it’s peak, it was time to return to the think locker and produce something new to address this failing of my teaching, or my students learning, and I guess both at once (since that’s rather how teaching work). 

Now, being realistic, as with all things everchanging and teaching related, it’s highly probable that next years bunch of students will not have an issue with recalling these concepts at all. Yet as a tinkerer with the teaching process it’s impossible to avoid making what appear to me to be improvements, even as I realise I’m falling for the trap of treating a past groups problems as the forthcoming and incoming group of students likely faults also. 

The Dilemma!

So, here’s the plan, the dilemma is that these concepts are numerous, 9 dot points total, with each dot point containing atleast two nested concepts contained within extended phrases. 

Step 1: What I done

Importantly, these many concepts are titled ‘social purposes’ and so the solution became clear. I mapped each concept to a series of gesture and whole body movements, filmed them in a vertical video format, audio commentated and added labels to them and posted them on TikTok and YouTube shorts respectively. 

To my students, what I’d produced was an underwhelming and not impressive ‘TikTok dance’, meeting them in a conceptual place and space that they understand. 

This was only step one, from my wider reading on memorisation techniques, encoding and recall, I have gathered that these techniques work best when students create their own movements and neural connections and pathways. 

So step one was all the preparation, and something of a proof of concept. 

Step 2: Catching the students up 

Step 2 was finding a non-embarrassing way to get students to come to these ideas for themselves through my teaching. So, A3 paper it was, I posted my videos to our LMS for the committed and engaged students to access it by chance they stumbled upon it, then it was time for students to have each concept explained and to create their own gestures for each. Sketching rough images of what this looks like for reference in step 3. 

Step 3: Everyone out of their comfort zone 

Now the goal here is embodied pedagogy, but at this point only I’ve ever embodied these concepts, students have at best, merely seen me do this, and drawn up some possible embodied gestures or actions for themselves. 

This is where everyone goes beyond their comfort zone, I took the class to the performing arts room, complete with a full length mirror.

As a class, we went through each concept with the students acting / performing their own gestures / actions in sequence, with their sketched A3 sheet at their feet. This was awkward for all involved.

This awkward factor was not an accident, we know from memory techniques that those things that are most memorable are graphic, sexual, lewd or taboo. Within a school setting, not surprisingly these things are not possible, but a situation like the one outlined is rather close. The experience itself being perhaps more memorable than merely sitting at a desk and noting down possible gestures. 

Just as some small notes, embodied, physical responses have been found to be effective for young Danish learning word reading (Damsgaard et al., 2022) and University students understanding of abstract statistical concepts via video (Zhang et al., 2021). Suggesting that the manner that common teaching approaches overlook the physical elements and the body, through ‘embodied cognition’, is not ideal. 

So next time you’re faced with a list of concepts that students struggle to grapple with, the limitations may be tied to the assumption of written culture and literacy-first cultures. It may well just be time to bust out the body and get students embodying the concepts rather than leaving them dead and dying on the dry page. 

References

Damsgaard, L., Nielsen, A. M. V., Gejl, A. K., Malling, A. S. B., Jensen, S. K., & Wienecke, J. (2022). Effects of 8 Weeks with Embodied Learning on 5–6-Year-Old Danish Children’s Pre-reading Skills and Word Reading Skills: the PLAYMORE Project, DK. Educational Psychology Review, 1-29.

Zhang, I., Givvin, K. B., Sipple, J. M., Son, J. Y., & Stigler, J. W. (2021). Instructed hand movements affect students’ learning of an abstract concept from video. Cognitive Science, 45(2), e12940.

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