Week 4 Readings

I found this week’s readings for interesting.  Chapter 3 of the kuma book reinforced what I have been learning in the education program at ISU.  The best way to maximize learning opportunities is to build on the interactions between students and interactions between the students and the teachers.  Dick Allwright defines classroom instruction as "the interactive process whereby learning opportunities are created."  I feel this quote is absolutely true.  In a successful classroom there needs to be interaction between students and between the teacher and the students.  When interactions take place in the classroom it feeds both students and teachers with opportunities that may not have occurred otherwise.  It was interesting to see some teachers miss learning opportunities and then explain they just didn’t think about it.  As future teachers this is a macrostratgy that is one of the most important.  If we cannot build learning opportunites from our students interactions or create them for out students then we as teachers are not only allowing our students to fail on understanding but we are setting them up to fail in the real world by not showing them how learning opportunities are everywhere.

I also found the article on CLT and the way Chinese schools and learning are not compatible to be a good source of information.  In China there is a deep respect for education.  The teachers are seen as a mentor and sometimes a parent, good teachers are the ones who care, help, and pass on their experiences.  They also hold teachers in such a high position that they are supposed to posses all the knowledge and always have the right answers.  This is not true of the teachers in CLT, teachers are at the same level of students and can learn from students.  This is only one way the article discussed the incompatibility between Chinese culture and CLT.  This article really brought to my attention how important it is to pay attention to the culture and context you are teaching in, to find the most appropriate method or methods.  In China, CLT won’t work as well as other methods, however, some aspects of CLT will work.  This reinforces that teachers cannot pick a method and stick to that but use several different aspects of several different methods to promote the best student learning.