Dear Hassina,
Here you are!
That’s the end of your ten week journey. What a wonderful journey it had been, hadn’t it?
I know your anxiety was high in the beginning. You wondered whether or not this program would meet your expectations, and today look at all the great things you’re taking with you: new knowledge, new practical immediately usable tools for your classroom, tons of ideas from your fellow students, and a new vision for the future.
You had always had your students at heart, and you are convinced that your job beyond teaching them the English language is to prepare them for this new more and more demanding century.
The expectations are higher today than they were a few decades ago, so you know you have to provide your students with the adequate empowering learning environment indispensable to stimulate the development of these high-order thinking skills required in our times.
Actively engage your students in their learning process is the key to attain this goal.
I’m certain you are thinking about how you are going to do that. It is such an upheaval in the current teaching practices in your institution, and technology could be of non negligible assistance.
You learned in this class that rather than use technology just because it is there, use it when it serves your educational objectives. You have already started making your students use technology to present their work which is a little revolution in itself. But that’s not enough!
If I may make a suggestion, I think you should start at rethinking your course syllabus. I personally like this idea from LoTi of turning up the H.E.A.T, you can use it for this matter. This acronym stands for:
Higher order skills
Engaged learning
Authenticity
Technology
Why not using it to reexamine your syllabus and redesign your current lessons accordingly?
However, if you want to move further than your individual level, remember what you learned from this course, you need a support system like this group of amazing teachers who started this journey with you .Replicate this fruitful collaborative experience in your setting and make more people around you understand and embrace your vision of today’s learning requirements.
Don’t forget the students! I’m quite certain you have overlooked involving the students.
That’s a mistake! They are the momentous stakeholders in this implementation process.
As I wrote in the beginning of my letter, engaging students is the key to attain your various goals. Follow my advice and success will be on the way.
Sincerely yours,
Hassina
PS: tell all these wonderful people who were part of your life for ten weeks that it’s only AU REVOIR not a farewell .
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Bonjour, Hassina
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that we got invaluable knowledge and a wide range of ideas and tools regarding teaching and learning through this course.
With these benfits, we could easily reach our goals by actively and interactively engaging our students in higher-order thinking activities.
In order to achieve this, it might a good idea , as you said , to share what we learned from the course with our colleagues a, and our students in our respective settings. It is very essential to redesign the course syllabuses to fit our future vision of education for our countries. In this move, we teachers, have a leading role to play.
Merci de la réflexion.
Bruno du Burkina Faso
Dear Hassina,
ReplyDeleteThis is a lovely post. You have found a great way to reflect on the course and express your thoughts, feelings and plans. I have learned a lot from your ideas during this course, and I hope that we will all keep in teach and continue sharing our ideas and experiences. Like you, I don't want to say goodbye, just see you soon.
Best wishes,
Nina