Both topics of this week were really great. I appreciate that fostering learner autonomy in our students should be one of primary objectives in designing our teaching practices if we aim life-long learning. The first step for autonomy is arousing an awareness in the students about their learning process. Here, I frequently encounter students asking me the best way to learn vocab. They ask “how can I learn the words? Should I write them as a list or is making sentences with the new words better?” I think such questions imply that those students are teacher-dependent and they just waiting for someone prescribing learning for them.
My answer for such questions is that: try to discover by yourself. Of course, as teachers we should support our students in their learning process. With regard to vocab, for example, we should show them different ways. For instance we can introduce them visualization or mapping etc… And then we should encourage them to think about their own learning styles and choose accordingly. The students should be encouraged to reflect on their learning, identify their weakness and strengths and discover themselves as learners, and take steps in accordance with this reflection. As teachers, we should create environments in which they can these steps easily.
The other topic (one-computer classrooms) was also didactic for me as one computer classrooms are very common in my setting. As a matter of fact, here we get happy when we have a class with a computer and a projector. So far, I have not thought about whole-class online activities that could be done even with one computer, but this week, I learned that there are some ways to incorporate whole class into an activity by using a comp and a projector (like the one I mentioned in my nicenet post). I am going to try it and see if it works…
Hello Aysel
ReplyDeleteYour philosophy sounds similar to mine, in that I want to expose students to possibilities to try out, and then hopefully they can figure out what works best for themselves. I do this in my pronunciation classes, when I say, "you need to try this technique in class. After class ends I recommend you try it a few times more by yourself, because it works for many people. But if it doesn't work for you, you do not ever have to do it again..."
I thus think of my role as an expert at knowing about possibilities, and then exposing students to those. But I want to let them decide what they will use or not use for life. Great post!
Robert