Just watched the recorded webinar "Assessing the needs of your students" that teacher Ana Cristina recommend us.
Excellent presentation! Among the different Personal Learning Network options, I think this is an easy way to keep yourself updated on different and easy strategies to help students learn and understand english in an easier way.
It presents "the basic aspects" to consider even before planning your class: Who are your students?, What are they interested in? What learning Styles they have?, and the one I consider more important: What LEARNING STYLE DO I HAVE???..
At the end of the presentation it was possible to downlowd a document to test yourself and find out your learning style, so I'll found out soon mine...
Aren't those webinars interesting? And even better, isn't free knowledge from experts a bargain, a total steal of which we should take advantage? Great to hear you were up to it!
ReplyDeleteIt is true that sometimes we neglect this important teaching aspect, the one that has to do with getting to know who we are teaching to and how they better learn. We could say we don't have time to test all of them to accurately know how they are like, but a good teacher will implement several activities ranging from Total Physical Response to any cognitive approach. How do students respond to each? Which one suits my needs better? We teachers should be able to evaluate our students 'on the fly' and to implement the best techniques to achieve our and their goals.
Truth is, too, that we are biased by our own learning styles. This is not inherently a bad thing, but the tendency to favour what we like doesn't necessarily fit in our students schemas. We should be flexible enough to embrace other techniques that might result more beneficial to our students regardless our preferences.
Anyway, this topic can be debatable for ages. Thanks for sharing this information with us and I look forward to reading more from you. Isn't this writing exercise (reflection) helpful? I love it.
Thanks for sharing the webinar. As I told you, I am studying to be a teacher also and the information in the webinar was wonderful!
ReplyDeleteI agree with Eric, we are biased by our own learning styles. It is hard to think outside of the box but I know you are good at accessing situations and giving encouragement.