Teaching Jazz Chants - Carolyn Graham

Funny Teaching style - I like it - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL Video - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL & Business - GLOBAL LOCALIZATION Network

Funny Teaching style - I like it - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL Video - HeyWhatEverSOCIAL & Business - GLOBAL LOCALIZATION Network

10. Finding Quality Supplemental Materials

Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

Research Update

This research deals basically with significant features for evaluating instructional materials. We need to have clear that teachers make a big difference in students´ learning and that materials with effective strategies can support that learning or interfere its impact on learners.

There are two special cases for learning strategies.

• Expertise reversal effect ( refers to students who possess high levels of expertise and do not benefit from the same strategies of those average students )
• Powerful resistance to learning (  has to do with learners misconceptions in a subject area )

Learning review includes examination of  strategies in instructional materials:

Motivational Strategies

• Positive Expectations: It is setting the right climate for learning that contributes to student´s motivation
• Feedback: feedback about what is good and what is wrong and how to improve while they are learning
• Appearance: materials should be appealing and provide the integration of subject matter

Teaching a Few "Big Ideas"

•  Focus for Students: major themes help students organize what they are learning following a sequence
• Completeness: focusing on big ideas help students develop a deep and  more complete understanding of a major theme

Explicit Instruction

• Clarity of Directions/Explanations: the learning process is improved with clear objectives focused on specific problem-solving and the teaching of thinking skills
• Exclusion of Ambiguity: special attention should be put on materials that uses confusing directions or inadequate explanations

Guidance and Support

•  Level: it includes a variety of appropiate skills like organized routines, better thinking skills, feedback and other forms of guidance
• Adaptability: while lectures help "advanced" students, "average" students need scaffolding. Also material should accommodate differences in learning styles.

Active Participation of Students

•  Assignments: should be logical extensions of the content and will be more effective when organized
• Student Responses: they learn more when following activities like peer tutoring, discuss controversial issues etc.

Targeted Instructional and Assessment Strategies

•  Alignment of Strategies: taking into account that some strategies are more suitable than others, instructional materials should use strategies that have been proved to be effective in producing learning outcomes.
• Completeness of Strategies: the combination of instructional strategies should also be complete enough to achieve learning outcomes.

Teachers tend to fall into the trap of  "teaching to the test", according to Mestre. Student learning should emphasize applied learning and thinking skills, not just learning a collection of definitions and isolated bits of information.

 

 Three major principles, according to Bass&Glaser, make assessment informative to students and therefore improve the teaching and learning process.

• Models of competence
• Graphical tools
• Structured opportunities for reflection

 Quote: It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.  ~Jacob Bronows

Principles of Effective Materials Development

By: MEd. Andrea Rodríguez Vega

The author starts talking about the way ELT materials are written by other authors and the different procedures they follow. Most of them rely on their intuitions but very few are guided by principles.

As the author offers his opinion saying that materials should be coherent and guided by theories of language and principles of teaching, I may add that authors should pay attention to what teachers and learners believe because they are the ones who spend more time observing and being influenced by the language. As I later found out, Bell and Gower believe so; they discuss the need for authors to make principled comprimises to meet the practical needs of teachers and learners.

Tomlinson continues talking about the development of ELT materials saying that they should expose the learners to language, help learners to focus on features of authentic input and arouse their curiosity and attention.

He stresses the importance on principles and procedures of materials development; he states that each principle needs to be derived from principles of language acquisition and then used to create or develop frameworks.

Tomlinson states six principles of language acquisition and immediately he offers the principles of materials development  according to each one of them; he later refers to principles of language teaching as an important part of materials development.

At the end, Tomlinson states principled frameworks as a basis to achieve coherence in the application of theory to develop materials.

As teachers, we sometimes expect textbooks or any other material to do wonders in the learning process. Although we are not much into textbook development, we should be taken into account as a positive media, with the needs of learners and the learning process.