This activity is taken from the ‘Thought Vectors in Concept Space’ syllabus designed by Dr. Gardner Campbell for an undergraduate research and writing course at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Nuggets activity:

1. Review ‘The Open Faculty Patchbook’, a collection of teacher-authored overviews of specific pedagogical skills.
2. Select one article that resonates with you.
3. Select a passage from the article that grabs you in some way, and prepare to make that passage as meaningful as possible.

It could be a passage that puzzles you, or intrigues you, or resonates strongly with you. It could be a passage you agree with, or one you disagree with. The idea here is that the passage evokes some kind of response in you, one that makes you want to work with the passage to make it as meaningful as possible. A good length for your ‘nugget’ is about one paragraph or so – too much, and it becomes unwieldy; too little, and you do not have enough to work with.

How do you make something as meaningful as possible? Well, use your imagination! You will probably start by copying and pasting the nugget, or if you are feeling very multimedia inclined, read your nugget aloud and create an audio file. From there, consider hyperlinks, illustrations, video clips, animated gifs, screenshots, infographics, or whatever.

Refer to the eCampus Ontario Extend Toolkit to help you with a technical tool selection choice for this activity. One of the main goals of this assignment is to get you to read carefully and respond imaginatively. Your work with ‘nuggets’ should be both fun and sincere. It should demonstrate your own deep engagement and stimulate deep engagement for your reader as well.

As evidence of completion, please add the web address or uploaded learning object for your response to your Extend NZ blog or portfolio.

Throughout this module, we have explored various types of metaphors for learning and teaching:

• Prior learning was luggage and potential roadblocks
• Motivation was drive
• Mastery and organisation of knowledge are like component building blocks toward a cohesive structure
• Self-direction and metacognition are like our own internal GPS, signalling our own personal wayfinding

Now it is time to put this all together and consider your own teaching philosophy. What is your metaphor for learning and teaching?

You might like to look at some exercises for exploring your teaching philosophy and some metaphors for teaching from the University of Waterloo.

Find a photo or draw a picture which represents you and your approach as a teacher; explain why this image represents you as a teacher.
As evidence of completion, please upload or link your image and explanation to your Extend NZ blog or portfolio.