I doubt few would argue with the statement that teachers are pragmatic, and find find that this often overflows into my everyday life to the point where I consider myself at times quite the efficiency-addict. I consider one byproduct of such an approach-come-mindset to be the effective use of time, causing me to often question why my students are not using their time nearly efficiently enough. Whilst I support the notion that this - like many self-management skills - needs to be taught and nurtured explicitly, will acknowledge that it leads me to at times overlook the requirements of scaffolded learning. This has come into my attention-field recently as I progress through an online course offered by Future Learn in that I, even as an adult learner, will switch off to things that are insufficiently scaffolded. I need to be metacognitively aware of the gradient of the graph which plots the challenge, as well as recognise where I am on such a hypothetical graph and to what point I am heading. Furthermore, I am requiring the self-management strategy to recognise when I need to re-examine something and, arguably more importantly, the time in which to do this without any potential for humiliation or loss of motivation. In this empathetic ‘student simulation’ I am thus finding myself realising that I too often expect students to be able to plunge straight into the same complexity of material that my own mind is currently contemplating who, not only is a subject specialist and more mature learner, but has been getting exposure to for the past hour planning the lesson! This I believe can manifest itself as a lack of time being used wisely, when in fact effective use of time is a direct function of the gradient upon which each individual student sits, not upon that defined by the curriculum, the goalposts of the teacher, or the clock.
