“Excellent teachers are made, not born;
they become excellent through
investment in their teaching abilities”
(The Professionalisation: 10)
Contemporary pedagogy of higher education suggests a lot approaches, methodologies and technologies. We do emphasize their special importance for future teachers. Professor Carol Evans, Professor Muijs, Dr. Tomlinson among High Impact Pedagogies pointed out Visual representations (concept maps, mind maps, time lines); Simulations/ Inquiry based learning; Problem based/project based learning; Games/gamification; Team based learning; Just in Time Teaching ( JiTT); Flipped Learning; Narrative pedagogies (Evans, Muijs, Tomlinson: 25).
The best opportunities for teaching our students to teach in the future are realized through the Methodology of teaching their professional subjects. Active engaged learning is successfully organized within small groups collaboration. It helps to develop some hard skills, in Methodology presented with selecting some texts for reading, designing an activity or a sequence of activities for teaching vocabulary, solving the critical issue in a case-study and a lot of other similar tasks. It is important to emphasize that each member of the group is responsible for the result of their work. The output of the group work should be assessed so that students could see the importance of their collaboration and find out possible ways for the improvement of their solutions, choices, actions.
Development of such soft skills as leadership in the classroom can encourage greater participation and more responses (Collier: 57), and contribute to making the classroom a “dynamic and exciting learning environment” (Greig: 82). As a result there appears a learning environment favorable for students to feel more relaxed to discuss, raise questions, and express ideas or challenging statements.
The student-led discussion surely facilitates “sharing, clarifying, and distributing knowledge among peers” (Rivard & Straw: 585), moreover it makes the content of the learning much closer to the students and meets their needs, perception peculiarities, generating examples more relevant to their lives (Collier: 57). One more constructive idea for boosting our students’ learning is near-peer instruction, when the peer leader as a near equal can be closer to students’ abilities to comprehend and solve problems (Tien, Roth & Kampmeier: 607). So, the interaction becomes more natural and is realized in relevant ways.
Graham Gibbs states that even lectures can become student-centered. Lectures can include quizzes and interaction, and some teachers turn ‘lecture’ slots on the timetable into large class workshops. ‘Lectures’ can be used to brief and de-brief active learning that takes place out of class, rather than assuming such study will happen automatically as the consequence of presentations (Gibbs: 17).
While teaching use at least one digital technology, tool or resource in class each time. So, your students can dive into the new topic by means of word cloud tools such as Answergarden word cloud generator. Besides, there are other useful tools such as:
WordArt | Artistic word clouds with shapes
Wordclouds.com | Custom shaped word clouds
WordItOut | Word clouds with emojis
Jason Davies | Word clouds focused on word placement
TagCrowd | Create word clouds from URLs
Abcya | Fun word cloud art for kids
Tagxedo | Word clouds from blogs, tweets, or URLs
Mentimeter | Interactive word clouds
Word Clouds in Python | Word clouds with code
To prepare for disputes, debates, discussions we use such resources as Kialo, LessWrong, Poll Everywhere.
In virtual reality students share their opinions by means of virtual boards such as Jamboard and Padlet.
But there are a lot of other boards such as:
Miro for turning ideas into tasks
Stormboard for creating multiple whiteboards in a single brainstorming session
MURAL for remote, multi-member team meetings
Limnu for teaching students remotely
InVision Freehand for annotating design files with a team
Conceptboard for turning a brainstorming session into a formal presentation
Explain Everything for creating whiteboard videos
It’s even more useful to organize creating posters in small groups. This mode of interaction teaches students to collaborate, to work in a team, to give and support arguments, to be responsible, to communicate and other useful soft skills so necessary in their future professional activity.
Task based approach gives wonderful opportunities for collaboration, communication, hands-on activities and development of soft skills.
Special role play activities which help students use their experience, share it and find the advantages of constructing new knowledge in this way. One of the favorites of my students is the activity “Speaking corners”. We have three locations in the classroom ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’, ‘Not sure’. They read or listen to a contradictory statement, go to the location which expresses their position, discuss in groups their opinions and present their arguments. Each group or student can ask questions, comment. They can change their point and change the location. The teacher only helps to summarize. When we tried this activity in our first class after the second lockdown, after the end of the class students were leaving the classroom with the words of gratitude. Real communication is one of the most important things in student-centered classroom.
Thus, student-centered classroom differs from teacher-centered with a set of such characteristics:
Respect and attention to the diversity of students and their needs, catering for their flexible educational lines;
Various ways of presenting/for discovering the educational materials;
Flexible use of pedagogical methods variety;
Evaluation of materials, methods and ways of helping students to construct their learning/knowledge, develop skills/ competences;
Fostering students’ autonomy, teacher’s support in students’ learning autonomously;
Students’ and teachers’ mutual respect;
Learning is preferred to teaching in student-centered classroom;
Giving more choice to the students.
The experience of creating student-centered classroom contributes to the whole system of education improvement. The students participating in such classes understand their advantages and become more demanding as for their academic freedom. The teachers catering for the development of students’ hard and soft skills, constructing their own learning are still considered innovators. We do hope that in the very near future all classes will become student-centered and involve students in taking decisions as for their learning.
References
Collier, K. G. (1980) Peer-Group Learning in Higher Education: The Development of Higher order Skills // Studies in Higher Education. num. 1, vol. 5. pp: 55-62.
Evans, C., Muijs, D., Tomlinson, D. (2015) Engaged student learning: high impact strategies to enhance student achievement. York: Higher Education Academy. 82 p.
Gibbs, G. (2012) Dimensions of Quality. Higher Education Academy.
Greig, Alison. Student-Led Classes and Group Work: A Methodology for Developing Generic Skills. // Legal Education Review. 2000. num. 3. pp. 81-89. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resource/dimensions-quality
Rivard, L. P., & Straw, S. B. The effect of talk and writing on learning science: An exploratory study // Science Education. – 2000. – num. 84(5). pp. 566-593.
The Professionalisation of Academics as Teachers in Higher Education. European Science Foundation (2013). Available URL: http://archives.esf.org/uploads/media/professionalisation_academics.pdf
Tien, L. T., Roth, V., Kampmeier, J. A. Implementation of a peer‐led team learning instructional approach in an undergraduate organic chemistry course // Journal of research in science teaching. – 2002. – num. 39(7). – pp. 606-632.
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