Modes


If you are planning to compose or adapt your own exercise, you first need to think about the problems you wish to solve. These should never be problems you already know the answer to.
 
When you have fully understood the problem, you should understand that there are a number of modes you can use to explore it. Modes are the very bottom of the pyramid of an exercise: they are the foundation on which everything rests. We are sometimes wary about introducing these modes to trainee teachers, because people can pick up a habit of seizing a mode before fully excavating the problem they want to teach - then the mode becomes the determinant of the exercise rather than the problem at hand. A similar thing can happen with techniques.

Modes can be thought of as ‘genres’ of learning which describe what participants are doing during the exercise in a more generalised way. They can overlap and an exercise can encompass multiple modes.

Below are some of the modes that we have found ourselves using and our thoughts about them.

We will use the problem ‘We want to teach people how to have arguments and remain commonly committed to the movement’ as an example to illustrate how the mode might be deployed in an exercise.


Library







What’s the time?
in Al-Quds -
in Panama and Chicago -
in Burkina Faso -
in Scotland -