2012年8月5日 星期日
Walking away from EDUC 326
I am now more confident than arrogant. In this course, some new tools, like the two theory, were added to my arsenal. I am prepared, and better equipped, to continue my exploration into the art of education. Right now, I am planning to read Classroom Management: A Thinking & Caring Approach by Bennet & Smilanich after I finish the book I am currently reading. I am glad that I did not just cruise through this course, because otherwise I would not have learned the lesson I did. I am a different, and hopefully better, person now.
What I learned
I have taken some courses about education now and I have always felt like seeing only the tip of the ice berg. Not only am I not seeing the big picture, these small pieces are often partly contradicting, partly corresponding to each other. Here is an example.
In a class I took online, I was told to use gestures, not words, to teach ESL students. Applying Need Theory, I would argue that students will feel powerless, and therefore unbelonging, in a classroom. Just picture a teacher, his/her lips sewed, hands pressing down, and every single students shut their mouth. This is a classroom where the teacher is the dictator and the students his/her people. Students' need for control and safety are largely unresponded to. Using Type Theory, I would argue that the feeling type learners may take some of these gestures as "silent complaint" to their personal behaviors. The extraverted learners are going to clash with this teaching style badly as their outward flow of energy will be met with a silent hand signal from the teacher.
Does the "gesture" way have no merits? No, as I would argue that it is useful in practice. From my own experience, it works well when your class goes out of control. Even better when you have no other medium of communication. I have had a tutoring class full of students of minority ethnicity. They were lost, damaged, and struggling to survive in a Cantonese-speaking country that does not offer any Chinese-as-a-second-language support to immigrants. They frequently ran away from the mosque in the middle of the class. Talking to them yield little because neither English nor Chinese were effective in communicating to them. To keep them at least in some sort of order without asking the priest of the mosque to help, I used different gestures. My silence and hand signal give them a direct message, and I was rewarded by their compliance. The tutoring classes ended up being a success and I built a strong and friendly relationships with all ten of my students.
Reflecting on my experiece and learning, I have truly come to appreciate teaching as an art. Teaching is so powerful, yet sophisticated, that teachers must always be on their toes for new things as the world changes. More importantly, theory and experiences must be used cautiously because every single classroom has a different context, and I would argue that context is more important than content. As a teacher, I feel like I am better than I was before because I am more accepting to new ideas. For the older generation, it was the internet and online gaming and social media. For this generation, it could be new ways of understanding our "self" and the relationship between our "self" and the world. Since most of us who are living in the "First World" are well-fed, safe and well-educated, the new generation of teachers are asked to teach students to achieve perhaps the self-actualization stage of Maslow hierachy. We as teacher should try to be teaching stage 5, and even stage 6 of moral reasonings. New challenges, such as teaching a green and sustainable life style, are daunting, but I am feeling prepared and ready to face them.
In a class I took online, I was told to use gestures, not words, to teach ESL students. Applying Need Theory, I would argue that students will feel powerless, and therefore unbelonging, in a classroom. Just picture a teacher, his/her lips sewed, hands pressing down, and every single students shut their mouth. This is a classroom where the teacher is the dictator and the students his/her people. Students' need for control and safety are largely unresponded to. Using Type Theory, I would argue that the feeling type learners may take some of these gestures as "silent complaint" to their personal behaviors. The extraverted learners are going to clash with this teaching style badly as their outward flow of energy will be met with a silent hand signal from the teacher.
Does the "gesture" way have no merits? No, as I would argue that it is useful in practice. From my own experience, it works well when your class goes out of control. Even better when you have no other medium of communication. I have had a tutoring class full of students of minority ethnicity. They were lost, damaged, and struggling to survive in a Cantonese-speaking country that does not offer any Chinese-as-a-second-language support to immigrants. They frequently ran away from the mosque in the middle of the class. Talking to them yield little because neither English nor Chinese were effective in communicating to them. To keep them at least in some sort of order without asking the priest of the mosque to help, I used different gestures. My silence and hand signal give them a direct message, and I was rewarded by their compliance. The tutoring classes ended up being a success and I built a strong and friendly relationships with all ten of my students.
Reflecting on my experiece and learning, I have truly come to appreciate teaching as an art. Teaching is so powerful, yet sophisticated, that teachers must always be on their toes for new things as the world changes. More importantly, theory and experiences must be used cautiously because every single classroom has a different context, and I would argue that context is more important than content. As a teacher, I feel like I am better than I was before because I am more accepting to new ideas. For the older generation, it was the internet and online gaming and social media. For this generation, it could be new ways of understanding our "self" and the relationship between our "self" and the world. Since most of us who are living in the "First World" are well-fed, safe and well-educated, the new generation of teachers are asked to teach students to achieve perhaps the self-actualization stage of Maslow hierachy. We as teacher should try to be teaching stage 5, and even stage 6 of moral reasonings. New challenges, such as teaching a green and sustainable life style, are daunting, but I am feeling prepared and ready to face them.
Drafting a Contract
 |
| The "Achieving Excellence in ESL" Contract |
 | ||
| IELTS materials |
Contract
-Accepting different ideas and opinions-
Vision: I should be open-minded and humble. One thing I always do is "NO". By "NO", I mean responding in a way that clearly says "you are wrong, I am right". When I hear something that is different, I tend to start a sentence with no that procceed to "correct" them. I would love to be a person that says "YES" and gives a warm welcome to different opinions. In other words, I am trying to be more post-modern.
Goal: Accept different ideas when they are presented to me.
Challenge: Replace all the "NO"s with "YES"s.
Plan:
Methods: Put a record sheet above my computer. Everytime I make a "NO" response, put a red mark on it. A "YES" response will result in a blue mark.
Activities: I will bring friends to my place instead of going out. I will have social activities with them normally. They will be marking me when I pitch a "NO" or a "YES" to them.
Strategies: Look up. As the course reader suggests, looking up actually somehow makes you feel relax and buy you time to regroup. I can use that time to draft a "YES" response.
Timetable:
Before school starts.
Problems:
I just love to say no. I have tried to fix this before but it did not work. My loved one has been complaining about it for years and little has changed. Perhaps the real problem is that I barely think before I speak.
Preventions:
Look up again! Relax and think before I speak. Speaking less may help too. Sometimes even I find myself a little too talkative. Some doses of silence can actually be gold for me.
Baseline:
More "YES" than "NO" recorded.
Evaluation:
Minimum: A 2:1 "YES" to "NO" ratio.
Satisfactory: Less than 3 "NO"s per week.
Excellent: A week without "NO"!
Demonstration:
A weekly record without any red mark will be great. Even better is that when I go into another course that involves peer evaluating, "accepting" will finally be one adjective that accurately describes me. Right now it is "effective", but "tyrant".
Celebration:
A big shout of "YES!!!!!!!!!" (and a new game I really want!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
Student H
H is a teenage girl I have been tutoring for a while. I assumed she was an introvert type simply because she was different from me.
"I think I am an extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment type. I tend to stay with large crowd but I love concepts and ideas more than actions. Behavior-wise though I am most likely seen as an extravert. " (Peer Interaction)
Since I thought she was an introvert, I also automatically assumed that she was a reflection/thinking type because I over-generalized all of them. Making matter worse, I chose the method of learning I learned the best for her, not the one that would work best for her. At the time I wrote:
" I think she definitely is a reflection type but I end up with action type by 7 points. I would suggest that the environment may be playing a big role in it."(LOG 2)
I chose to present these pieces because I thought they remind me that I should be humble. I wrote "the best thing I know is I know close to nothing" and the next thing I did I kicked Type Theory out of my potential repertoire because I "knew" they would never work. It may be true that theories must be closely examined before they are put in use, but I had not closely examined it. If I were already a teacher I would have lost my creditibility because I do not know my craft. Type theory is a tool I learn to use if the situation arises and I should not just ignore it.
Putting Type Theory into work, I asked her to give me the 4 letters type preference using figure 2 on A Teacher's Guide to Cognitive Type Theory and Learning Style.
The simple test yielded INFP. According to her type preference, I made the following change to the class:
-- No more grammar exercises in 30 minutes (from a typical J type teacher)
-- More time allowed for thinking and experimenting by herself (I as a J type likes to give constant comments on her work. Now I seize doing so knowing that she is an IP that needs free, solo time)
-- I start every class by a "how are you doing lately?" instead of "have you finish the homework I assigned you last week". (build a personal relationship with the F type learner in her)
-- refrain from disturbing her when she is daydreaming a bit (IP learner may benefit from some "birdwatching")
Although I cannot say for sure if she is learning more effectively or not, since the changes were made she has been looking happier. So far, taking the stress away without apparently hampering her learning definitely looks like an improvement to my classroom. I wish I have started to at least try out the "new tools" earlier, and I have come to wonder how I can prevent my arrogance from hurting me and my students again.
"I think I am an extraversion, intuition, thinking, judgment type. I tend to stay with large crowd but I love concepts and ideas more than actions. Behavior-wise though I am most likely seen as an extravert. " (Peer Interaction)
Since I thought she was an introvert, I also automatically assumed that she was a reflection/thinking type because I over-generalized all of them. Making matter worse, I chose the method of learning I learned the best for her, not the one that would work best for her. At the time I wrote:
" I think she definitely is a reflection type but I end up with action type by 7 points. I would suggest that the environment may be playing a big role in it."(LOG 2)
I chose to present these pieces because I thought they remind me that I should be humble. I wrote "the best thing I know is I know close to nothing" and the next thing I did I kicked Type Theory out of my potential repertoire because I "knew" they would never work. It may be true that theories must be closely examined before they are put in use, but I had not closely examined it. If I were already a teacher I would have lost my creditibility because I do not know my craft. Type theory is a tool I learn to use if the situation arises and I should not just ignore it.
Putting Type Theory into work, I asked her to give me the 4 letters type preference using figure 2 on A Teacher's Guide to Cognitive Type Theory and Learning Style.
The simple test yielded INFP. According to her type preference, I made the following change to the class:
-- No more grammar exercises in 30 minutes (from a typical J type teacher)
-- More time allowed for thinking and experimenting by herself (I as a J type likes to give constant comments on her work. Now I seize doing so knowing that she is an IP that needs free, solo time)
-- I start every class by a "how are you doing lately?" instead of "have you finish the homework I assigned you last week". (build a personal relationship with the F type learner in her)
-- refrain from disturbing her when she is daydreaming a bit (IP learner may benefit from some "birdwatching")
Although I cannot say for sure if she is learning more effectively or not, since the changes were made she has been looking happier. So far, taking the stress away without apparently hampering her learning definitely looks like an improvement to my classroom. I wish I have started to at least try out the "new tools" earlier, and I have come to wonder how I can prevent my arrogance from hurting me and my students again.
Type Theory
Although the course reader fully expects us to feel excited reading Type Theory, I was not thrilled at all. During my first encounter with Type Theory, I wrote:
"Teaching is very powerful and I sometimes feel like tools such as psychological tests may trick teachers into controlling the students even more because they think they know better and can decide for them. Nevertheless, I think these tests are useful in a lot of ways but application of them must be very cautious. " (LOG 2)
At the time I completely denied the possibility of Type Theory ever being put into good use as I wrote:
"It is important to remember that psychologists and therapists need ten years of training to qualify using these tests."(LOG 2)
It is ironic when I wrote this later:
" I think I am more equipped to be a good teacher after the said course because I learnt that I know close to NOTHING about students and humans."(LOG 2)
I fell into a logical trap. Since I knew nothing about human beings, what was the reasons behind my claim that the tests could not work? And it only get more embarassing when I misunderstand how Type Theory work:
"I am surprised you can score almost nil in intuition! I scored pretty high on that. I am starting to feel lonely in the extravert camp. It seems that I possess more introvert traits(the thinking) than the extravert type(the feeling). " (Peer Interaction)
I chose to present this mistake out of many I have made because it became extremely relevant in my teaching of student H.
"Teaching is very powerful and I sometimes feel like tools such as psychological tests may trick teachers into controlling the students even more because they think they know better and can decide for them. Nevertheless, I think these tests are useful in a lot of ways but application of them must be very cautious. " (LOG 2)
At the time I completely denied the possibility of Type Theory ever being put into good use as I wrote:
"It is important to remember that psychologists and therapists need ten years of training to qualify using these tests."(LOG 2)
It is ironic when I wrote this later:
" I think I am more equipped to be a good teacher after the said course because I learnt that I know close to NOTHING about students and humans."(LOG 2)
I fell into a logical trap. Since I knew nothing about human beings, what was the reasons behind my claim that the tests could not work? And it only get more embarassing when I misunderstand how Type Theory work:
"I am surprised you can score almost nil in intuition! I scored pretty high on that. I am starting to feel lonely in the extravert camp. It seems that I possess more introvert traits(the thinking) than the extravert type(the feeling). " (Peer Interaction)
I chose to present this mistake out of many I have made because it became extremely relevant in my teaching of student H.
Going into EDUC 326
Although it is tough to admit it, but I was arrogant going into this course.
In a course that changes my life last semester, I learned so much about great minds
in the field of education and philosophy. I felt like the ultimate piece of knowledge
about human beings was within reach and any other teaching theories would be a cake
walk. I was wrong.
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