Reflection in the Learning Process, Not As An Add On Is it personality? Are some people born with it? Can it be learned? I am talking about REFLECTION. At the beginning of the week, I had the opportunity to be part of a workshop during our pre-service ( we just returned from our summer break here in the Southern Hemisphere) with our ES Principal, MS Principal and HS Assistant Principal. The topic was student reflection. The following ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS emerged out of the planning for this workshop How does student reflection impact student learning? Reflection is a meaning making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and its connections to other experiences and ideas.Reflection is a systematic, rigorous way of thinking, with its roots in scientific inquiry.Reflection needs to happen in community, in interaction with othersReflection requires attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and others.
Blog commenting as reflection. Related 26. 30. Process writing: mixing it up. As the name suggests, process writing is an approach to writing which focuses on the process rather than the end product. The argument goes that, just as writers in the ‘real’ world go through a process of editing and revising what they write, so should our students. The typical structure for a process writing lesson might be: 1 Brainstorming ideas. 2 Plan the structure of the writing 3 Write first draft 4 Get feedback on first draft from teacher or peers (or self-evaluation) 5 Write second draft (and third if appropriate after feedback) I think there is a lot to be said for taking a process approach to writing: Feedback Generally speaking, whatever colour ink we use and whatever correction code we use, we often might as well have not bothered marking written work.
For most students, once something has been written and handed in, it’s over: out of sight, out of mind. Students also develop their ability to self-evaluate, which is something they can go on to use independently. Task repetition. Writers’ Workshop Method in the Reading Classroom (Kyoto JALT MyShare, 2013) | The Other Things Matter. I’m a pretty anti-comprehension questions guy. Not because I think they are entirely useless, but because I use a number of texts that don’t come with good comprehension questions, which would require I write them myself.
Just what would that take? Here is an abbreviated version of what Paul Nation (2008) notes about good comprehension questions: - They should be easier to understand than the text itself - Answering the questions requires reading the text, which means you should first corral a very proficient reader to try and answer the questions without reading the text before using them. - The questions should use language/words not in the text itself, which makes them even more difficult to write for lower level students who have limited vocabularies. - The questions need to test comprehension, not memory, so focusing on details which a proficient reader might not remember is a no-no 1. 2. 3.
References: Masuhara, H. (2003). Nation, I. Like this: Like Loading... ‘Discovery Listening’ revisited (again) – a joint post with Arun Warszawski | pedagogablog. Last May – almost a year ago! – Rachael Roberts posted here and here about an approach to ‘teaching listening’ that Magnus Wilson named ‘Discovery Listening’. It inspired a very skeletal post from me, which I’m now finally getting around to following up, thanks to the lively #AusELT chat we had on the topic two weeks ago.
I started teaching in 2001 and spent my first couple of years following what John Field refers to as the ‘Comprehension Approach’ to ‘teaching listening’ (thanks Rachael Roberts for the link). I became increasingly aware that students found listening to authentic spoken English very challenging and also felt it was an important marco-skill to develop; yet, the coursebook listening activities never seemed to hit the mark.
Getting students motivated to listen to the recordings more than once or focus on the transcript was bafflingly difficult. Arun and I first started discussing this about 4 years ago and have had many more chats about further refinements to it since. Why I shouldn’t be surprised; and why I sit down. Why should I be surprised that I was able to carry out a seminar in Cairo with school teachers which involved a deep discussion of the relationship between culture and English and its underlying politics? They were a group of about 30; and from the very outset they engaged fully with the discussion and contributed ideas that helped me sort out my own.
It was my own cultural prejudice that initially allowed me to be influenced by colleagues and the whole orientation of our profession to believe that teachers don’t relate to or even understand theory. We sat down together – looked at bits of text and images, considered critical statements, evaluated concepts, reconsidered established professional principles, and moved to new understandings. ‘We sat down together’ is such an important part of this. So I got my table and when everyone arrived I asked them to shuffle their chairs so that we almost sat around the table – and it was more like a meeting. World's Largest Professional Network | LinkedIn. MSU Learning Communities. AvatarGeneration | Educational Apps & Game Based Learning. Twitter.