This semester at my TDC course helped me think
more about my classes, since the first day of this subject that I have been
thinking about how my classes are and how could I change them in order to help
my students learn in a positive way. Every class I go or every text I read
gives me more ideas to use; there are three steps or words that triggered me
the most, which are: the prior knowledge, the three functions and the concrete
experience.
First, before planning the class, the teacher
should bear in mind what kind of background, experience her or his students
have and their age; these are called prior knowledge. We as teachers should not
think about our own experience, background or the way we prefer to learn because
each person has his or hers own experience and methods to trace their own path
in learning. In Zull’s words: “when we find out what our students already know,
we are actually finding out about their neuronal network. We are discovering
the connections they have in their brains”.
Second, according to Zull, there are three
functions of the cerebral cortex: sensing, integrating and motor. Sensing is
related to all four senses (listening, hearing, smelling and tasting) that are
input. In this level, students gather their information and integration means
to organize all this sense in the brain, analyze and then put everything into
practice, by creating, speaking, writing and so on.
Third, students learn by concrete experiences,
which mean that they learn, simply, by being involved into living the
experience, for example if the teacher teaches a dialogue or grammar point it’s
important that students role play it, pretend in a place and they have to use
the grammar point taught.
I would like to describe one activity that I do
in class in order to introduce vocabulary about food items to young learners. I
start the class by eliciting from them what kind of food they like and write their
answers on the board or I play the hangman game on board and then elicit from
them the items as well. Later, I show them some pictures. While showing the pictures, I (drill the
words and work on spelling and pronunciation).do some activities: drilling, working
on spelling and pronunciation. After students feel confident and safe about the
vocabulary, I start to ask some questions such as: what do you like the most? What
do you like the least? Is this food healthy or unhealthy? Then, I ask them to
open their books and practice the vocabulary in the book.
However, this is the point that I changed in my
class this week: instead of asking them to open their books, I did another
activity which I showed students one short video related to food and asked them beforehand to grasp all the items they could see and later write in a piece of
paper. After this activity, I told them to talk to their friends about what
they have seen and check spelling. I also invited the ones who wanted to come
to the board and write one food. Later, I gave them ten more minutes to come up
with a dialogue to use in a restaurant, they did it, role played it and loved
it.
To summarize, the activity that I just thought
about contains the important steps for the brain to learn and what Zull
commented in his book is that not only how will our students learn, but also
how we as teachers can improve learning environment in our classes and how we
can plan a better class in order to work all the skills and achieve the goal to
all students. It is important to keep in mind that teachers have the “power” to
make the students like the subject or not.
