Post for 11/22
At the beginning, I had a bit of trouble differentiating learning activities and teaching strategies. Frankly, I've been trying to blur the line between them enough that I wasn't sure that a differentiation would even be helpful. After some thought though, these are not only different in terms of the stages of the planning process but one is the basis of the other. After some thought this seems obvious but for whatever reason I had difficulty separating them at the start and it felt like a silly argument over semantics. For me, strategies get me thinking more about implementation than planning and it felt like they were different sides of the same coin and they kind of are but in different ways than I originally thought.
What really broke this down for me was thinking of strategies as the 'how.' That is, the main diagnostic and planning stages for the learning activities. It resonated with me mainly since I have been working on designing my own lesson plans to test out in front of a real live class for the first time. I've been lucky to have the guiding help of my co-op during this process but the 'how' and 'why' are problems that have consistently come up to cause me to re-think my plans and revise what I've already done.
What this has taught me in the process is that there can be nothing that's arbitrary in a plan and strategy is the term used to imply this need for order and organization. While activities and assessments can work in concert together and be used to direct student learning, the strategy process is the realm of the teacher. Planning for organization prepares us for the unintended consequences of the chosen activity and can keep us on track. Like much of the theory we read, it's not supposed to be out in the open but in the subtext of our teaching.
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