I think that students learn through socialization. In other words, learners learn through communication with others. Every one can learn, although their learning is in different terms of process and speed.
Here is an example to explain how this learning happens. For my students, the only thing they can connect with China/Chinese is their Chinese teacher. I am the only resource for them to learn at this point. Most of the time, they are “repeating after me”. Are they learning? Of course, all learning starts with “copying” someone. Without a “community” (at least two people), learning could never happen.
I believe that all the students have the capacity to learn. Many world language teachers share similar stories as me. We all have some students who are receiving some special help from school concerning their learning abilities. However, in our world language classes, they perform even better than other academic level students. I always think, for foreign language, whenever you start to learn, you are at the baby stage, and no matter if you are 5 or 25. I have a student who has mental challenges. She has problem to learn math, science, but not Chinese (actually she is pretty good). Another student has a speech problem, but she doesn’t have a speech problem in Chinese.
There are many factors that may shape students’ learning capacity: students’ mental development, teachers’ instruction, etc... I believe everyone can learn, but in different processes. Some students are good at memorization, some are good at analysis. Every student has a different capacity and that capacity can change due to environmental influence. Except for parents, the teacher is the most important element to shape each student’s learning capacity.
As an educator, we have very strong influences on students’ capacities. You must hear a lot stories like “I love to learn math because my math teacher from 3rd grade” or “I hate learning science because my teacher at my middle school is so terrible.” What we are doing in our classrooms can either motivate or decrease this capacity. Some of my students love learning Chinese. They told me that they are going to China when they grow up. They learn Chinese language and culture after school through the internet or purchased materials. An old Chinese proverb states “Teacher is architecture of soul” - We are changing the way our students think and believe; they are changing their capacity of learning.
The first thing those assumptions told us is that learning would not happy separately. One object of our instruction should be to help our students connect the new knowledge to their background knowledge, and to help them discover the new situation. I would have more students-centered discussion and performance-based assessments which offer more opportunities for students to socialize in their community to discover the best practices for them to learn.
P.S. 2. Pick one domain that you are interested in learning more about.
Domain 3 Instruction.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Task Two
The purpose of curriculum is to help students acquire basic, important information and skills. Curriculum also serves to make sense of the content by presenting content in a logical flow. It also acts as a guide to connect the knowledge from the classroom to students’ real life experiences at school and beyond.
Three roles are addressed in the article (Wiggins) that supports the purpose outlined above. In direct instruction, teachers help students acquire the basic knowledge and information. Using facilitation, teachers will help students to process information and make it meaningful for learners. In the role of coaching, teachers offer opportunities for students to apply the information and skills into more complex, new situations.
To directly answer the second question, in my case I have little control in designing the curriculum – it is handed down from the district. However, I have the flexibility to design assessment and learning activities for each lesson.
Teachers should have much more control of curriculum design. Again citing my experience, students would be better off if a suitable curriculum were designed for each class since each classroom’s condition is so different (grade level and foreign language abilities). I think it would be best if teachers identified their classroom and individual needs for learning which should be aligned with their curriculum. The design of the curriculum should be both reflexive and dynamic, having the capacity to adapt to student abilities. It should be more bottom-up, student driven instead of an inflexible, handed-down district developed curriculum. The unit design should be especially more flexible for teachers to create more effective units which build upon state and local standards as a foundation.
The curriculum I have is the same curriculum for all the elementary world language teachers in my district. No matter what language we teach, we must teach the same curriculum (e.g. who am I, what color is my hair, etc…). The current curriculum is designed by a group of our elementary world language teachers. It is very new group and is still in the experimental state. Ideally, the curriculum should support well the core content of the appropriate grade level. In other words, the foreign language content should complement the current learning for each grade. Students should easily be able to make a content connection.
The curriculum gives me content by unit. However, not enough content is given to support my daily lesson planning process. On the bright side, I have more space to control my lesson design. The curriculum gives focus questions for each theme, and “I can do” statements as objectives for each unit. These objectives are the outcomes I want students to achieve when I design my daily lessons. This gives flexibility for teachers to create their own unique daily lessons and corresponding activities. The downside to this approach is that it is very time consuming to create 100% of my daily teaching content and 100% of student resources. I don’t have a teacher’s edition of a text book that I can use as a guide, nor do the students have Chinese textbooks. In addition, I never know if my lesson plan and class activities will be effective.
I am concerned with my district’s top-down approach to foreign language curriculum. Foreign language is different than other subjects and Chinese is especially different with other languages. The curriculum does not address these differences in an effective way. Furthermore, the foreign language curriculum as a whole does not connect well with core units, which makes it more confusing for students and for me.
Three roles are addressed in the article (Wiggins) that supports the purpose outlined above. In direct instruction, teachers help students acquire the basic knowledge and information. Using facilitation, teachers will help students to process information and make it meaningful for learners. In the role of coaching, teachers offer opportunities for students to apply the information and skills into more complex, new situations.
To directly answer the second question, in my case I have little control in designing the curriculum – it is handed down from the district. However, I have the flexibility to design assessment and learning activities for each lesson.
Teachers should have much more control of curriculum design. Again citing my experience, students would be better off if a suitable curriculum were designed for each class since each classroom’s condition is so different (grade level and foreign language abilities). I think it would be best if teachers identified their classroom and individual needs for learning which should be aligned with their curriculum. The design of the curriculum should be both reflexive and dynamic, having the capacity to adapt to student abilities. It should be more bottom-up, student driven instead of an inflexible, handed-down district developed curriculum. The unit design should be especially more flexible for teachers to create more effective units which build upon state and local standards as a foundation.
The curriculum I have is the same curriculum for all the elementary world language teachers in my district. No matter what language we teach, we must teach the same curriculum (e.g. who am I, what color is my hair, etc…). The current curriculum is designed by a group of our elementary world language teachers. It is very new group and is still in the experimental state. Ideally, the curriculum should support well the core content of the appropriate grade level. In other words, the foreign language content should complement the current learning for each grade. Students should easily be able to make a content connection.
The curriculum gives me content by unit. However, not enough content is given to support my daily lesson planning process. On the bright side, I have more space to control my lesson design. The curriculum gives focus questions for each theme, and “I can do” statements as objectives for each unit. These objectives are the outcomes I want students to achieve when I design my daily lessons. This gives flexibility for teachers to create their own unique daily lessons and corresponding activities. The downside to this approach is that it is very time consuming to create 100% of my daily teaching content and 100% of student resources. I don’t have a teacher’s edition of a text book that I can use as a guide, nor do the students have Chinese textbooks. In addition, I never know if my lesson plan and class activities will be effective.
I am concerned with my district’s top-down approach to foreign language curriculum. Foreign language is different than other subjects and Chinese is especially different with other languages. The curriculum does not address these differences in an effective way. Furthermore, the foreign language curriculum as a whole does not connect well with core units, which makes it more confusing for students and for me.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Task One
In recent years there have been several commentators critiquing school curriculum. As a result, educators have been shifting their attention to rethinking current curriculum. Curriculum is a guide for educators to set clear what should be learned and how to approach the teaching method. On some issues, there is not complete consensus on what students should know, how much they should know, how deeply they should know, and in what ways teachers should approach the instruction. The purpose of considering curriculum is to best benefit learners; either from the viewpoint of what should they learn or how they should be taught.
I am a foreign language teacher. One of the most important principles for developing the curriculum is that the content of what we teach must be meaningful for our learners. To define this more precisely, students should feel what they learn in the classroom is somehow connecting to other subjects they are learning and/or their experience beyond the school. The learning experience is an opening conversation between students and teacher. In the world language curriculum of my district, all the themes and units are addressed by questions. For example, our first theme at P1 is “Who am I?” Students will discover or communicate with their teacher in the target language to learn how to describe themselves in the target language. They learn what they need or want to know about themselves in the language. Also for the assessment there are no completely standard answers. This approach of teaching is student centered and conversational based; not teacher/lecture driven. Students have the opportunity to talk about themselves, what happened to them at home, or what they just learned at school (in the target foreign language, of course). I prefer this question-based model of foreign language curriculum because it is links the students’ actual thoughts and experiences with the foreign language, which reinforces learning.
Wiggins advocates that educators should move their focus from “covering the curriculum” to “creating curriculum”. Wiggins’ opinion implies that students would be better served if all the standard content and outcome statements were taught in question form. Students would actively inquire and discover the knowledge for themselves. Most of the assessments should be about big ideas and have an open ended format. Teachers are more like coaches rather than instructors. To be honest, I love this idea. The goal of education is that learners become thinkers – they learn to think for themselves.
However, I have reservations. This new approach demands more of the learners: their engagement and willingness to learn. This is a huge challenge for the big education environment. It seems not all students show up ready and willing to be active learners. Most students need standard guidance, especially in the early education stage. For some engaging and promising students, I believe this approach will benefit their learning greatly. In theory I love Wiggins’ idea. However, I don’t think all students are driven and engaged enough to make the Wiggins approach mainstream. It might be best for advance programs. Given that I teach students of broad academic competencies, for now I do not buy that we need a new approach to curriculum.
I am a foreign language teacher. One of the most important principles for developing the curriculum is that the content of what we teach must be meaningful for our learners. To define this more precisely, students should feel what they learn in the classroom is somehow connecting to other subjects they are learning and/or their experience beyond the school. The learning experience is an opening conversation between students and teacher. In the world language curriculum of my district, all the themes and units are addressed by questions. For example, our first theme at P1 is “Who am I?” Students will discover or communicate with their teacher in the target language to learn how to describe themselves in the target language. They learn what they need or want to know about themselves in the language. Also for the assessment there are no completely standard answers. This approach of teaching is student centered and conversational based; not teacher/lecture driven. Students have the opportunity to talk about themselves, what happened to them at home, or what they just learned at school (in the target foreign language, of course). I prefer this question-based model of foreign language curriculum because it is links the students’ actual thoughts and experiences with the foreign language, which reinforces learning.
Wiggins advocates that educators should move their focus from “covering the curriculum” to “creating curriculum”. Wiggins’ opinion implies that students would be better served if all the standard content and outcome statements were taught in question form. Students would actively inquire and discover the knowledge for themselves. Most of the assessments should be about big ideas and have an open ended format. Teachers are more like coaches rather than instructors. To be honest, I love this idea. The goal of education is that learners become thinkers – they learn to think for themselves.
However, I have reservations. This new approach demands more of the learners: their engagement and willingness to learn. This is a huge challenge for the big education environment. It seems not all students show up ready and willing to be active learners. Most students need standard guidance, especially in the early education stage. For some engaging and promising students, I believe this approach will benefit their learning greatly. In theory I love Wiggins’ idea. However, I don’t think all students are driven and engaged enough to make the Wiggins approach mainstream. It might be best for advance programs. Given that I teach students of broad academic competencies, for now I do not buy that we need a new approach to curriculum.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
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