Learners' Autonomy

Here are some tips that I found important for teachers to follow in order to build up learners' autonomy:


Offer encouraging, focused feedback as well as general praise to encourage students to work with purpose.

Recognize and praise effort. Help your students develop self-efficacy by helping them see the connection between effort and achievement.






Make success possible. Begin each assignment with the easier material, question, etc. Creating confident learners will encourage them to keep trying.




  Offer students a variety of ways to self-monitor their work. The easiest way is to offer them checklists to keep track of completed tasks.

 
It’s almost magic. If you think highly of your students, they will tend to behave better for you than for the teachers who obviously do not enjoy being with them.


 

Give clear written and verbal direction so that your students can find it easy to stay on task. Students who know how to do their work well will be less apt to be off class than those who do not know what they need to accomplish in class. Examples of bad work are also helpful because they can show student what not to do.




Arouse student curiosity about a lesson and you will find that inherent motivation will prevent many discipline problems.




Spend two minutes at the start of a lesson: ask questions, show photos, play clips, give quick teamed activities…anything that will encourage students to want to learn more.

Spend time setting goals with your students. Looking forward in this way gives your students practical reasons for wanting to do their work.





 For more Information see this link.
 

Project task 5: Implementing Technology Tools in the Classes

In my project for this course,Through using technology tools, I am trying to solve some problems that I am going to face when teaching a course called “Developing Literary Criticism through Creative Writing” for the forth level in the University. The problems that I am trying to solve are:

1.       Rigid and annoying nature of the course

2.       Timing

3.       Lack of resources

As I am not teaching this course at the moment, I am going to reflect on the plan of the course and what I expect to happen through implementing technology.

First, for solving the problem of the rigid and annoying nature of the course, as I proposed before, I am planning to use web-quests as a media for using PBL Project based learning technique. As they are based on collaboration and team work in creating the projects, the students are going to find it much more fun and interesting tool for learning in this course.  For giving the students idea about the changes, I am going to follow the following steps:

1.       Introduce the outlines of the course in a PPT presentation.

2.       Ask the students if they have e-mails, familiar with using internet, blogs and social networks.

3.       Ask the students about their passion towards literature and creative writing.

4.       Give them my e-mail, so they send me a message giving their names, and providing a short description of how they are expecting the course to be.

5.       Once I get their e-mails I will send instructions about how they can create a Blog, as well as the link for the web-Quest.

6.       After reading the instructions, students are going to create their own Blogs, in order to post their assignments in their blogs.

7.       I can also create a group on face Book, as all the students have Facebook accounts and are familiar with using it. It will be the place where they can meet and discuss all that is related to the course. It will also be helping in solving the problem of timing, because most of the assignments have to be done in groups, and students do not always find a suitable time that is common between them as they do not have the same timetables.

In this first lecture, the students are going to be so excited about the course, first, because they admire the internet- and especially facebook. Secondly, teachers in the university do not always use these technological tools that seem interesting for the students. Most of them do not think of internet as a good medium for teaching they keep just attached to the grammar-based curricula that the students find boring. Another reason that will make the students so excited about the course is that they are going to be exposed to develop new technological skills as they are learning. Thus, the course will no longer be annoying for them as they feel that they are learning through entertainment.

There are some items that they are going to find new, like the idea of using Blogs and Web-quests. Students can help each others in creating blogs and using the Web-quest for their course. They can use the course’s page on face book in order to share advices and solutions. They can also contact me if they find any problems.