American higher education is shifting from a focus on what teachers teach to what learners learn. The role of teachers is shifting from one of disseminator of knowledge to facilitator of learning. One of the ways that we can encourage the shift to occur is in the construction of learning centered syllabi.
The focus in schools today is to raise achievement among our students. While that is an admirable goal, I suggest that schools evaluate what they are already doing well. Then, get rid of those less important strategies and focus on those that are really working.
What's this -- classroom assistants must learn to do nothing? Is this crazy talk or what? No, not crazy -- totally serious. It's is often extremely beneficial when managing children's behaviour to stand back and do nothing.
Overall, the main way in which Montessori children differ from traditional students is that Montessori children love to learn. They do not memorize facts and figures for the purposes of passing a test or pleasing adults. It is that passionate love for learning which separates Montessori students from traditional students.
The reason I like the end of the year so much is because it is such a clean break. At no point during the regular school year do I feel anything but an impending sense of doom every day when I get home from work. I am always behind and playing a game of catch-up.
You already know your subject better than anyone else, and you are ready to share your knowledge. Have your knowledge respected, and your instruction remembered.
Thanks to a lot of research, it has been found that creative thinking can be taught and learned. So as teachers, we should be encouraging and developing creativity, but this is often not the case.
An important responsibility of an ESL teacher is to create an effective learning environment for learning to take place. This involves both actions and the decisions of the teacher. The actions are those things that are done in the classroom, such as rearranging the chairs and desks. The decisions relate to how and when these actions are implemented.
In recent years a debate has developed over which approaches to structuring, planning and implementing lessons are more effective. Theorists and practitioners are constantly arguing about how language acquisition takes place and how best to facilitate this. Many approaches and methods have been developed which have had a substantial impact on language teaching.
Excellent instructors know the power of metaphor, analogy, and story. They engage in elegant leverage by using something their students know well in order to introduce, explain, and anchor that which is being taught and learned. Additionally, systems thinking is rife with metaphor, analogy, and story. The simple diagrams of systems thinking serve to sketch reality, using circles and arrows and graphs we know and understand to create images that represent abstract ideas and complex relationships.