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 .
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
WEEK 9 : CLASSROOMS WITHOUT WALLS!!
I don’t know why, but this week the chorus of one of the PinkFloyd’s protest songs “THE WALL” popped up in my head:
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, Teachers, leave them kids alone !
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
Without going to deep into the metaphorical meaning of this song, I wondered whether today we were the same kind of bricks in the wall they were talking about in 1979, keeping our students locked up in educational practices that have proved to be inefficient in terms of learners’ autonomy.
And I thought WAOUAW! We have come such a long way since then.
Nobody would have ever imagined a few decades ago that with technology the walls of our classrooms could just fall or disappear if we wanted to. Creating virtual or extensions of our classrooms is no longer impossible or complicated. Don’t we say that when there’s a will there’s a way? And here we are again this week with some of the great at hand tools available on the web for us.
As “autonomous” learners we can make our own decisions on what to take or what to leave to meet our individual needs. But above all, I was stunned by my fellow students’ creativity when proposing and designing specific activities for their students using the tools.
Why not doing that with our own students? Why not helping them to become autonomous and creative at the same time?
I was on an intensive training this week, and we had been introduced to a famous author/educator public speaker’s views: Ken Robinson. His resonant message is to rethink our educational systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. Indeed, he says that what was suitable for the needs of 19th century industrialization era does no longer fit in our century.
It should be mind-opening to all of us.
We should not renounce to our own creativity and subsequently our students’ because of our multiple institutional or curricular constraints. We can still teach the curriculum, but in ways that would engage our students more actively, nurturing autonomy and creativity in our classroom using technology. We often forget it, but infusing technology in our teaching practices may also mean make our students use technology online or offline.
I think that if we follow our journey we can be the kingpin of a partial upheaval of our current educational systems through our individual rethinking of our teaching practices.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/sir_ken_robinson.html
We don't need no education
We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey, Teachers, leave them kids alone !
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
Without going to deep into the metaphorical meaning of this song, I wondered whether today we were the same kind of bricks in the wall they were talking about in 1979, keeping our students locked up in educational practices that have proved to be inefficient in terms of learners’ autonomy.
And I thought WAOUAW! We have come such a long way since then.
Nobody would have ever imagined a few decades ago that with technology the walls of our classrooms could just fall or disappear if we wanted to. Creating virtual or extensions of our classrooms is no longer impossible or complicated. Don’t we say that when there’s a will there’s a way? And here we are again this week with some of the great at hand tools available on the web for us.
As “autonomous” learners we can make our own decisions on what to take or what to leave to meet our individual needs. But above all, I was stunned by my fellow students’ creativity when proposing and designing specific activities for their students using the tools.
Why not doing that with our own students? Why not helping them to become autonomous and creative at the same time?
I was on an intensive training this week, and we had been introduced to a famous author/educator public speaker’s views: Ken Robinson. His resonant message is to rethink our educational systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence. Indeed, he says that what was suitable for the needs of 19th century industrialization era does no longer fit in our century.
It should be mind-opening to all of us.
We should not renounce to our own creativity and subsequently our students’ because of our multiple institutional or curricular constraints. We can still teach the curriculum, but in ways that would engage our students more actively, nurturing autonomy and creativity in our classroom using technology. We often forget it, but infusing technology in our teaching practices may also mean make our students use technology online or offline.
I think that if we follow our journey we can be the kingpin of a partial upheaval of our current educational systems through our individual rethinking of our teaching practices.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/sir_ken_robinson.html
Saturday, March 06, 2010
WEEK 8: WANTED! AUTONOMOUS LEARNERS
What do most teachers dream of at night? A classroom full of autonomous learners!!
If asked to define an autonomous learner, most teachers would say that the autonomous learner is the multi-intelligence “SELF-EVERYTHING” learner: self-acting, self-learning, self-motivating, and self-managing… indeed, the “PERFECT LEARNER.”
One may think that if students could do everything by themselves, teachers should be terminated.
CERTAINLY NOT!!
Broadly speaking, the autonomous learner knows that learning is a process not a product. He is equipped with a wide range of strategies he can apply to language learning, with the skills to try out these strategies whenever necessary, and with the ability to assess their effectiveness. Debate still exists on this matter, but “there is a consensus that the practice of learner autonomy requires insight, a positive attitude, a capacity for reflection, and a readiness to be proactive in self-management and in interaction with others.” Little
http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1409
Consequently, students should be equipped and trained towards autonomous learning. The teacher s’job is then to accompany his students on the difficult journey towards autonomy, help them acquire the skills they need to operate in a more and more demanding world.
These planning, monitoring, evaluating, reflecting, decision-making, accessing and organizing information skills we are talking about should be transferred from the teacher to his learners.
This entails a certain degree of autonomy from the teacher, too. If teachers want to understand what is involved in learner autonomy, they need to experience autonomous learning themselves (McGrath 2000) and to be committed to developing themselves (Smith 2000).
http://independentlearning.org/ILA/ila03/ila03_lamb.pdf
This is what we are doing in this training, isn’t it?
We are compelled to use all the above listed skills we are willing to equip our students with if we want to fulfill the various tasks. However, they are not transferable overnight. As we are moving steadily away from our traditional ways and trying to implement what we have been learning in our respective classroom, we are guiding our students towards autonomy.
Designing more learner-centered lessons that integrate these notions of learning styles, interaction, collaborative work, individual or group reflection is a giant leap for us (not humanity) and our learners and technology can help to achieve this goal.
The lack of technology is not an excuse. My comrades ‘lessons plans for the one computer classroom prove that when we give ourselves the time and the chance to reflect on the things we can do in our different contexts ,we can come up with workable solutions for each of us.
Hassina
If asked to define an autonomous learner, most teachers would say that the autonomous learner is the multi-intelligence “SELF-EVERYTHING” learner: self-acting, self-learning, self-motivating, and self-managing… indeed, the “PERFECT LEARNER.”
One may think that if students could do everything by themselves, teachers should be terminated.
CERTAINLY NOT!!
Broadly speaking, the autonomous learner knows that learning is a process not a product. He is equipped with a wide range of strategies he can apply to language learning, with the skills to try out these strategies whenever necessary, and with the ability to assess their effectiveness. Debate still exists on this matter, but “there is a consensus that the practice of learner autonomy requires insight, a positive attitude, a capacity for reflection, and a readiness to be proactive in self-management and in interaction with others.” Little
http://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1409
Consequently, students should be equipped and trained towards autonomous learning. The teacher s’job is then to accompany his students on the difficult journey towards autonomy, help them acquire the skills they need to operate in a more and more demanding world.
These planning, monitoring, evaluating, reflecting, decision-making, accessing and organizing information skills we are talking about should be transferred from the teacher to his learners.
This entails a certain degree of autonomy from the teacher, too. If teachers want to understand what is involved in learner autonomy, they need to experience autonomous learning themselves (McGrath 2000) and to be committed to developing themselves (Smith 2000).
http://independentlearning.org/ILA/ila03/ila03_lamb.pdf
This is what we are doing in this training, isn’t it?
We are compelled to use all the above listed skills we are willing to equip our students with if we want to fulfill the various tasks. However, they are not transferable overnight. As we are moving steadily away from our traditional ways and trying to implement what we have been learning in our respective classroom, we are guiding our students towards autonomy.
Designing more learner-centered lessons that integrate these notions of learning styles, interaction, collaborative work, individual or group reflection is a giant leap for us (not humanity) and our learners and technology can help to achieve this goal.
The lack of technology is not an excuse. My comrades ‘lessons plans for the one computer classroom prove that when we give ourselves the time and the chance to reflect on the things we can do in our different contexts ,we can come up with workable solutions for each of us.
Hassina
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