Teaching for Success: The Classroom and The World (Week 1)

Hi there,

So, this time I'm gonna share with you the summary that I gain by taking this course by British Council what the so called as Teaching for Success: The Classroom and the World. There are one lead educator in this course and three educators and those are Claire Ross, Sirin Soyoz, Josh Underwood, and Doina Fleanta respectively. For your information, this course is the part of the teaching for success: Professional Practices for English Language Teaching Program, a series of three four-week courses which can be taken in any order in Futurelearn.com.

1. Challenges for 21st-century education

An educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson has outlined some challenges facing education in the 21st century.

Reasons why people reforming public education in the US:

1) educational reasons: how do we educate our children to participate in the 21st-century economy when we can't predict what it will be like?

2) cultural reasons: how do we educate our children so the have a cultural identity while being part of the global community?

What Robinson sees as problems with the current US educational system:

1. the way they view intelligence: many brilliant people think they are not.

2. the way they try to standardise: current education system was designed for different age-the industrial age. This creates production line mentality.

Three challenges for future education based on Robinson view:

1. need to think differently about human capacity-beyond the myth of academic and non-academic

2. education systems should recognise that most great learning happens in group-collaboration is the stuff of growth

3. to enable 1 and 2 to happen, the institutional culture of education systems needs to change

21st-century skills-based on British Council:

1. critical thinking: develop children's ability to reason, solve problems, and make judgements

2. communication and collaboration: to collaborate and communicate in order to share and create information, skills and values

3. citizenship: sense of belonging in your society

4. creativity and imagination: develop new ideas to deal with new issues and problems

5. digital literacy

6. leadership and personal development

Why promote critical thinking?

Approaches to help learners to be critical thinker:

1. be more independent and analytical

2. formulate and test hypotheses

3. consider other points of view

4.  justify and explain their own ideas

Learning in groups:

1.improved achievement

2. retention of learning and social relationship: prepare children for later life when they will be expected to work as part of a team when they are in a university

3. increasing intrinsic motivation

4. lessen the stress and give more time for learners to work on their pace

The example of collaborative learning:

1. discussing an idea or solving a problem with a partner or a group

2. watching film and discuss it afterwards

3. group brainstorming

4. doing homework together

5. team planning meetings

6. create a product in a group

Collaborative learning and languages

Experienced teachers use collaborative activities: 

1. pair work and group work with CLL methodology used peer assessment

2.dictation (write two sentences of a story and then Ss swapped their papers with their friends), jigsaw readings

Involving learners in project work

Samples: creating a class web page, prepare and give a group presentation, and create a video