DLT is not a teaching technique, it can form all aspects of teaching by making things more familiar for the students. Teachers can use DLT to lecture, learn a skill, form something conceptual, impact decisions on assessment and can also be used for ELL.
Teachers should focus on using their power points as an outline. Students do no learn by just listening to a teacher talk. For students to truly learn, teachers need to make their lessons as concrete as possible (Just because something is simple doesn’t mean it’s concrete). Teachers can use DLT to lecture by breaking up their lectures with diagrams, pictures, videos and personal examples.
DLT can be used to form the difference between learning a skill and forming something more conceptual. An example of a skill would be tying shoes where as a concept would be the phases of the moon or the process of photosynthesis. A concrete way of using DLT to form a skill would be having the students tie the shoe themselves. Abstractly, teachers would ask the student to tie another students shoe or to write out the process very detailed step by step. This would ensure the teacher that the student truly understood the concept of tying a shoe.
Finally, using DLT to impact assessments would be to use diagrams on the test. To make the assessment as concrete as possible for the students, a teacher should use a diagram as the test itself. An example of this that my group talked about in class was when learning about the brain. The teacher could have each student come up and show where each part of the brain is on the diagram and what is does. I firmly believe that if I was able to be taught and assessed with a diagram of the brain I would still remember where each part was and what its actions were.
You make a very good point about your example of the brain. When I was in my psychology class in high school, our teacher would pointed to a picture of a brain and just assumed that we would learn and understand it for the test if we memorized every little part of it on our own. It sometimes feels like our teachers will assume we understand something if only we are presented with the abstract, such as in a very basic power point.
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