Asides

Good project outcome

I had a student tell me today our final project changed the direction of her life. Although she is an English major, she has decided to use her English skills as an instructional vehicle to teach Korean, her native tongue. These are the moments you live for as a teacher- learning that something you designed had a profound impact on the life of a student. I’ll be sure to put the project together in the existing and a revised form to share.

Implementing Peer Instruction to the EFL Classroom

I’m working out some ideas on how to use Peer Instruction with Socrative for grammar or other direct-instruction aspects of the course. At this point it’s mostly notes to myself, if they’re useful to you or you wish to comment on them, have away at it.

One option:

  • Flipped Learning: Put the grammar lesson in a video for students to watch at home.
  • Have students complete a couple of questions for homework/reinforcement.
  • In class, start with a “quiz” (formative assessment) where students use Socrative to choose the best answer (or submit short answers) to a given question key to understanding the grammar lesson. As in PI, students discuss discrepancies for one or two minutes and then vote again.

 

To learn or to just get through

I’m having a hard time with motivation. I want to learn something, I don’t feel like I’m learning much, and as a result, I don’t care much. I’m trying to find a way to learn in my assignments and get something out of this process, but it’s really just slowing me down. I’ve gotten to the point where I just have to get through the work, and unfortunately, I’ll just have to do the learning later.

What do we desire of our students?

One of my constant complaints as a teacher is that I feel I’m assigned to teach material that is irrelevant. It’s hard to make that interesting. In response to that, I suppose, I’ve been exploring the Dogme philosophy/pedagogy that has become rather en vogue in certain ESL circles. The idea behind Dogme, or unplugged learning, is to get away from a pre-determined syllabus, frequently inappropriate in level or content of interest to students, and instead draw on the students’ immediate needs, circumstances and interests to drive the content of the course.

In essence, the problem I face in my current situation boils down to this:

If there is one student attitude that most all faculty bemoan, it is instrumentalism. This is the view that you go to college to get a degree to get a job to make money to be happy. Similarly, you take this course to meet this requirement, and you do coursework and read the material to pass the course to graduate to get the degree. Everything is a means to an end. Nothing is an end in itself. There is no higher purpose.

When we tell students to study for the exam or, more to the point, to study so that they can do well on the exam, we powerfully reinforce that way of thinking. While faculty consistently complain about instrumentalism, our behavior and the entire system encourages and facilitates it. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

So I wonder what I can do. I’m in a situation where I’m required to cover a textbook, my students are part of a cohort that takes unified exams, and no one seems to be interested in anything other than going through the motions of education, although I feel very little is actually accomplished that has any value at all to the students.

Please leave any advice or comments you have below.