WEEK 2 : LEARNING CULTURE

--Originally published at lehrersimon

Hello again to everybody,

I was exited seeing the videos of two teenagers telling about why do we have to believe in them, how they see their learning processes, and what strucked  me was their engagement!

It made me questioning myself: Am I still flexible enough, can I still move on with them in a way that inspires them. They made me think and reflect on the Simon I was when I was seventeen. That was nice……I had some real good moments reliving this age.

Hackschool, pirate teaching / learning: words that I would have loved when I was seventeen, and which still are inspiring to me, maybe I haven´t changed that much.

Well now to  this week´s reflections:

 

• I  give students opportunities to engage in meaningful activities without the teacher being central.

 

Yes, but not enough! For example when students are learning about clothes, I let them organize and present a fashion show, they have to do this in German……..when they are learning about food, they present a receipe of a tipical german meal, when they are learning about the country, they have to plan and present a trip to Germany, etc                  In these activities you can see that they´re more  involved, even those students which normally show less interest are working hard.

But here is my problem: we have to work a lot before being able to talk about it. My students learn german from the beginning, and though they learn a lot in a short time, discussing and talking easyly is something that takes time . How can I have them learn the basics in a meaningfull and different way ?  At the beginning they need much help on pronouncing and understanding !

 

• I scaffold these activities and make them accessible to all students through differentiation and feedback.

 

Yes I scaffold  these activities and they are available to all, my expactations vary with the ability and progress of individual students and I firstly try to make them feel good about it , which to my opinion is more important as only correcting them.

Thanks again for your attention and have a nice sunday, for those who are fathers: enjoy your day !

( the video will be posted later )