These are some long term goals and the few skills I will be focusing on for the next few years. I have rationalised each of these strategies, because I want to ensure that I am maximising these methods for the benefit of students:
1. Cooperative Learning Strategies
- Increase accountability for each student in each activity
- Create a better environment for students in learning
- Cooperative learning helps support students to create a safe learning environment, forces them to learn how to cooperate with others even if they dislike them.
- Aligns deeply with my teaching philosophy and helping students to appreciate others.
2. Peer Assessment and Feedback
- Teach students about what is considered valuable feedback
- Teaching students about what is effective helping
- Is simply allowing someone to copy your work going to help them learn?
- How does explaining help you learn?
- Think of creative ways to help someone else understand something.
- Peer teaching and learning has been shown to be far more effective than teacher input.
- Increases the learning curve of students' outcomes, and personal feedback.
- Instant feedback = greater chance to improve
3. More use of Gesture Method
The "gesture method" was originally developed for Spanish and French, and there is no explicit curriculum developed for students in Indonesian. However, I have attempted at applying this theory to what I can for simple language that can assist students to remember, e.g. Spreading my arms wide for "besar"/big.
Without me prompting in English the term, students are able to recall the term in Indonesian without the need to "language switch" because they are internalising the language item through visual association, thus bypassing the usual habit of interpreting back to English vice versa in their minds to make comprehensible output.
"Language switching" or constant interpreting of language impedes students from utilising language at maximum efficiency. Although I have very limited vocabulary to apply the gesture method to, it acts as a very strong supportive teaching strategy in assisting the students with learning difficulties and also the kinaesthetic and visual learners.
From my informal questioning during class, I have observed that it has significantly improved the results and retention of language in my students. The biggest difference is I now notice that many students are unable to respond when I ask "Apa artinya… big?", whereas if I ask; "Apa artinya …" then gesture symbol for big, the response is far quicker and students are more able to see a visible pattern in sentences and grammar when I am asking them questions in class.
For improvement:
- Create more explicit instruction for students to learn their vocabulary.
- Create more expectation for students to also use the gesture method as they are learning.
Other Pedagogies to Consider:
TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) - most students absolutely loved the story telling, however without experiencing this kind of pedagogy myself, I am having difficulty working out what aspects are useful for teaching and what are not.
Project Based Learning - some kids loved the autonomy of writing their own story, were very excited at the beginning, however most needed scaffolding and became very confused. I am curious at the retention of knowledge for the students, considering how easy it is to simply Google Translate something they don't know.
Gamification - the use of gaming language and process to engage students as independent learners. Useful for multi-levelling the classroom, and encouraging students to engage at home.