Recommendation on How to Teach

Situation: When I was teaching English in Japan, I often had students who learned faster than others did just by participating in class. As part of my own experiment, I decided to peacefully force my shy students to participate more. This made my class the most wanted in the Japanese institute.

Recommendation #1: Have students participate more in class.

Statement: It is well known that students who have hands on approach or are active on any given subject tend to remember and learn things more clearly. As Confucius said, "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; but directly involve me, and I'll make it my own."

Justifications:

1. student performance during class discussions can be improved if the instruct or develops consistent and articulable standards for assessing classroom participation, According to Jacobs and Chase (1992), weighing student behaviors into a course grade “contaminate the grade as a measure of achievement of the course objectives” (p. 195). Jacobs and Chase identify several reasons for not grading class participation: professors generally don’t provide instruction on how to improve participation; interpretation of student behavior is difficult and subjective; participation often depends on a student’s personality thus disadvantaging shy or introverted students; record-keeping is problematic: participation scores for a given individual are hard to justify if challenged.

2. Anderson (2009, p. 63) Psychologists have proposed that there are serial bottlenecks in human information processing, points at which it is no longer possible to continue processing everything in parallel. In my example, I mention a simple game exercise where students will focus only on two tasks; thinking about what they like and choosing either a new taste from other student or their primary interest. In an era of multi-tasking, is often forgotten how students should be taught. Anderson (2009, p.64) mentions wherever there is a bottleneck; our cognitive processes must select which pieces of information to attend and which to ignore.

3. To better understand the complex interactions that support student learning and learning-related beliefs and behaviors, we need to study teachers and students in a classroom without their permission – this is my belief. Turner and Patrick (2004) mentioned that participation in lessons facilitates learning. There are a number of ways that students can participate overtly, including offering their ideas and thoughts spontaneously volunteering to answer questions, answering questions when called on, demonstrating at the chalkboard, talking to peers or the teacher about tasks, and completing written work.

Example: One way to discover what motivates students is by simply asking them. However, when you are dealing with children, most adults often believe that because they are children they will not understand a question such as “what motivates you?” I discovered when working with children ages 5 to 8 that curiosity is most appealing to them. Thus, I started a new game called “ Pick me or I Will Pick You.” First, I asked my students to think about something they like and write down on a flashcard, they will flip it and pass it or exchange it with other student. The student will pick up the card without seeing what is written in it and put it in their head. Now, everyone will pick me or will be picked. This brought laughter, smiles, and happiness to the student that after finishing with the project everyone was so energized, making them learned new vocabulary by doing this game. At the end, the students had to create a sentence with their partner using those two words they picked. Of course, to build intrinsic motivation, we must build a climate of understanding and trust. This does not come easily as you need to earn their trust.