Journey of shoelaces – Productive Pedagogy

The original lesson plan surrounding ‘shoelace’ was a bit ‘raw’ and didn’t go beyond the topic ‘shoelace’.

original plan



After I studied the examples and gone back to the productive pedagogy manual, I re-organised and revised my plan. I kept quite a few original ideas and added ‘child labour and sweatshop’ into the plan. These steps bring the unit plan out of the small topic ‘shoelace’ and into a wide world background. Apart from the making students realize about some real world situation, I also take the students into community in search of support for their petition. In the later version of my plan, I put more emphasis on connectedness to the world, group work and seeking support from community – students net working and collaborating. Also, more ICT requirements were embedded into the plan, so that students have to use ICT to complete their projects and present some of their assignments in ICT form.



revised plan



Before I just focused on plan, didn’t think too much about pedagogy, later after I was lining up my plan with the pedagogy guidelines, I started to re-think about my plans – are they good enough? How many areas has this step covered? Can I modify it to make it cover another productive pedagogy? Can I modify it to cover other pedagogy that I haven’t touched yet? All these sorts of questions started to pop into my mind and I was pushed to think, think and think.

I’ve also learned that as a teacher, we cannot work alone. We have to learn from our colleagues. No matter how good we think our plans are, always refer to the productive pedagogy, and we will find steps that can be improved.