Didactic intervention: what is it and how is it created?

A summary of the characteristics of this educational phenomenon specific to schools.

In a broad sense, any action carried out by the teacher so that his students learn the content he has to teach is a didactic intervention. the content to be taught is a didactic intervention..

However, there are certain nuances and aspects to highlight in terms of the strategies that are usually involved. Next we will see a little more in depth this concept.

What is a didactic intervention?

Broadly speaking, a didactic intervention is understood to be the set of actions with purpose, raised with the intention of achieving socially determined educational objectives.. The didactic intervention includes a set of phases intended to promote the learning of the didactic units stipulated in the school curriculum.

It is any specific program or series of steps to help specific steps to help students acquire the learning set out in the curriculum.. Interventions of this type can focus on areas such as reading, mathematics or physical education. They are designed to ensure that students make appropriate progress throughout the academic year and that, at the same time, teachers and parents know how the process is progressing.

It must be understood that students may present all kinds of needs during the educational process, needs that must be studied and duly intervened. Didactic interventions are focused on the academic sphere, that is, acquiring knowledge or skills directly related to what is given in class. They are not behavioral interventions in that they do not focus on behavioral problems..

Among the characteristics that can be highlighted of this type of interventions, we have:

• They are intentional: they are directed to a particular need or difficulty.
• They are specific and formal: they last a certain number of sessions.
• They are designed in such a way that students' progress can be monitored.

Although each didactic intervention has a specific objective, established on the basis of the students' needs and the demands of the curriculum, depending on the pace of learning, the strategies applied can be changed. That is to say, the didactic interventions admit a certain flexibility.. This can manifest itself in different ways, such as the incorporation of more weekly reading sessions or a more in-depth approach to what is taught in class.

Is it an adaptation?

It is important to emphasize 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, in case there are any, difficulties. The didactic interventions are applied in a way that allows the students with some 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 adaptive setting, the student receives some special support, either in the form of resources or directly by being placed in a special classroom. For example, an accommodation would be giving a severely visually impaired student a textbook with larger print and a flashlight or special glasses so that he or she could read what others read.

This is not to say that a person with a disability cannot be given an instructional intervention or taught subjects equivalent to the rest of the children in his or her class. What we want to emphasize here is that an adaptation implies "translating" classroom content in a way that is closer to the student's level, while didactic intervention is intended to bring the student to the same level of knowledge as the rest of the classmates.while the didactic intervention is intended to help them acquire the same levels of knowledge as the rest of their classmates.

How should a didactic intervention be developed?

The first thing to do when implementing a didactic intervention is to delimit, define and formulate the objectives to be achieved with it.. These should be both general, that is, extrapolated to the rest of life, and didactic, focused on what is given in class and oriented to pass exams, know how to do homework, relate the knowledge acquired with nature, the city... Although the objectives are, naturally, the last thing to be achieved, their delimitation is the first thing to be considered in a teaching-learning process.

In an educational context, the objectives are all those behaviors that students are expected to manifest as a consequence of certain teaching activities. These behaviors should be susceptible to observation and evaluation. The word "behavior" should be understood in its broadest sense, since it includes all the behaviors that are expected to be manifested by students as a result of certain teaching activities.The word "behavior" should be understood in its broadest sense, since it includes all patterns of intellectual, expressive, operative and ethical conduct, related to the contents taught in class.

Teaching activities should be subordinated to the didactic objectives and, at the same time, one should 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 have been overestimated or that needs may arise that make it necessary to rethink the initial objectives.

Contents

The contents that will make up the academic curriculum should be chosen on the basis of the objectives of the course. should be chosen on the basis of the objectives to be achieved.. To this end, the teacher should ask himself a series of questions to make sure that what he is going to teach is related to what he wants the students to achieve:

• What to teach?
• Why teach it?
• When to teach it?
• How to teach it?

In essence, the contents are the instruments used by teachers to achieve the objectives set out in each of the teaching units into which the given subject is structured.

Several principles can be followed when selecting the contents of the subject. However, the fundamental and inalienable one 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 be more difficult for them and, for this reason, priority should be given to more relevant content, 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 should be chosen on the basis of the objectives to be achieved, there are several criteria that can be applied, there are several criteria that can be applied when selecting the contents:

• Base or scientific structure of the content.
• Functionality and relevance of the contents.
• Logical significance of the contents.
• Limitations of the conditioning factors: type of material, structural and timetable.
• Own training, interest and professionalism of the person who must teach it.

Example of didactic interventions

The didactic interventions do not imply the simple exposition of the content to be taught.. They involve promoting the retention of that content through various strategies in which students are involved in such a way that they acquire a better depth and familiarity of the concepts given in the classroom context. To understand in a practical way a simple case of didactic intervention, we have the following example:

We have a classroom in which the math teacher is aware that many of his students present serious attention problems, but that they are neither pathological nor due to a diagnosis of ADHD.

The teacher, in order to prevent them from being distracted, usually applies strategies on which they can concentrate 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. Then, to become familiar with addition and subtraction, ask the students to position themselves to form equations that result in the value that the teacher says or to say what they are giving.

In this way the teacher manages to teach its content, in this case to know 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 outside the content being taught in class.

Bibliographical references:

• López-Moya, M. (2004). The didactic intervention. Resources in Physical Education. Teaching, 22, 263-282.