Didactic Intervention: What It Is And How It Is Created
In a broad sense, any action carried out by the teacher so that his students learn The content that has to be taught is a didactic intervention
However, there are certain nuances and aspects to highlight regarding the strategies they usually involve. Below we will look at this concept a little more in depth.
Broadly speaking, didactic intervention is understood as set of purposeful actions, proposed with the intention of achieving socially determined educational objectives The didactic intervention includes a set of phases with which it is intended to promote the learning of the didactic units stipulated in the school curriculum.
This is any program or series of specific steps to help students acquire the learning presented in the curriculum Interventions of this type can focus on areas such as reading, mathematics or physical education. They are designed so that students progress adequately over the course of the academic year and, at the same time, teachers and parents know how the process is taking place.
It must be understood that students may present all types of needs during the educational process, needs which must be studied and duly intervened. Didactic interventions focus on the academic sphere, that is, acquiring knowledge or skills directly related to what is taught in class. They are not behavioral interventions as they do not focus on behavioral problems
Among the characteristics that can be highlighted of this type of interventions, we have:
Although each didactic intervention has a specific objective, established based on the needs of the students and the demands of the curriculum, depending on the pace at which learning occurs, the strategies applied may be changed. This is, didactic interventions allow for some flexibility This can manifest itself in different ways, such as incorporating more weekly reading sessions or addressing what is taught in class in more depth.
It is important to highlight that a didactic intervention is not an adaptation. It is not that the student with difficulties is left behind, but that the group is motivated to acquire the same knowledge, detecting, if any, difficulties Didactic interventions are applied in a way that allows students with a problem to catch up with the rest of the students, as long as this need can be satisfied without the need for adaptive means.
Normally, in an adaptation context the student receives some type of special support, either in the form of resources or, directly, by taking him to a special classroom. For example, an accommodation would be having to give a student with severe vision problems a textbook with larger print and a flashlight or special glasses so that she could read what others read.
This does not mean that a person with a disability cannot receive a didactic intervention or that they cannot be taught subjects equivalent to the rest of the boys and girls in their class. What we want to highlight here is that An adaptation involves “translating” class content in a way that is closer to the student’s level while the didactic intervention aims to acquire the same levels of knowledge as the rest of their classmates.
How should a teaching intervention be developed?
The first thing to do when applying a didactic intervention is delimit, define and formulate the objectives that you want to achieve with it These should be both general, that is, extrapolated to the rest of life, and didactic, focused on what is taught in class and aimed at passing exams, knowing how to do homework, relating the knowledge acquired with nature, the city… Despite Since the objectives are, naturally, the last thing that will end up being reached, their delimitation is the first thing that must be raised in a teaching-learning process.
In an educational context, objectives are all those behaviors that students are expected to manifest as a consequence of certain teaching activities. These behaviors must be susceptible to observation and evaluation. The word “behavior” must be understood in its broadest sense since it includes any pattern of intellectual, expressive, operational and ethical behavior, related to the contents given in class.
Teaching activities must be subordinated to the teaching objectives and, at the same time, we must not lose sight of how learning progresses, in order to detect possible problems in the classroom. This is why it is so important to understand that these didactic interventions must admit a certain degree of flexibility in the application of teaching activities, given that the level of the students may always have been overestimated or that needs may appear that make it necessary to rethink the initial objectives.
Contents
The contents that will form the academic curriculum They should be chosen based on the objectives you want to achieve To do this, the teacher must ask himself a series of questions to ensure that what he is going to teach is related to what he wants the students to achieve:
In essence, the contents are the instruments that teachers use to achieve the objectives set in each of the teaching units in which the given subject is structured.
Several principles can be followed when selecting the contents of the subject. However, the fundamental and inalienable fact is that, no matter how much emphasis is placed on everything given in class, students will not learn absolutely everything explained. There will always be something that will cost you more and, for this reason, Priority should be given to content that is more relevant and easily related to the individual’s life
Apart from the fact that the contents are chosen based on the objectives to be achieved, There are several criteria that can be applied when selecting content:
Didactic interventions do not imply the simple exposition of the content to be given They involve promoting the retention of this content through various strategies in which students are involved in such a way that they achieve better depth and familiarity with the concepts given in the classroom context. To practically understand a simple case of didactic intervention, we have the following example:
We have a classroom in which the mathematics teacher is aware that many of his students have serious attention problems, but that they are not pathological or due to a diagnosis of ADHD.
The teacher, to prevent them from being distracted, usually applies Strategies where they focus for a while while moving and having fun A good idea is to assign each student a number or a plus (+), minus (-) or equals (=) sign. So, to become familiar with addition and subtraction, he asks the students to position themselves by forming equations that give as results the value that the teacher says or that they say what they are giving.
In this way, the teacher manages to teach his content, in this case knowing how to add and subtract, using a fun technique that allows students to understand arithmetic in a practical way. In this case, seeing that there was a difficulty, specifically lack of attention, he has chosen to use a resource in which they are not still, to avoid having moments in which they can be distracted by any stimulus unrelated to the content taught in class. .
López-Moya, M. (2004). The didactic intervention. Resources in Physical Education. Teaching, 22, 263-282.
