Sharing Challenges: What we Probably Find in our F2F or Hybrid
Teaching
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Thursday, September 16, 2014
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 144
Reflecting upon my challenges as a college
professor over here in Costa Rica, I must confess that a deep change in
students’ mind set is needed. This is stated because there are many factors
that can influence learners’ success at the university level or a drastic
failure for students majoring in any study program. Let us review some of these
challenges we all face –from time to time- at our higher level education
institutions.
Though I have more than 15 years of
experience teaching at the university level, and over 20 years teaching English
as a foreign language instructor, it is difficult to change students’ mind set. I cannot
say that I am encouraging a “surface” approach to learning among my learners,
but this is what I sometimes get to see as their response in class or in the
papers they have to write as part of their English Language Teaching major.
Because I mostly work with technology in education and literature now, I insist
on the importance of reaching higher hierarchical thinking process among my
pupils, but some of them are still resilient to accept that learning is in
their hands and not in mine.
Students’ mind set is the one challenge I get
to face and that prevents them to access deep learning in any college subject.
It does take some time for pupils in college to transition from their high
school way of studying (surface learning), -at least in my country (Costa
Rica)-, which prevents them from moving from a merely memorization-oriented way
of studying to a more deeper understanding and reflective way of learning the
subject-mattered for each course. When confronted with moving away from that
comfort zone, you experience lots of complaints from their part, but in the
end, they set their feet out of their comfort zones that –professionally speaking-
will not make them succeed in higher education or in ELT.
Some other teaching challenges I face while
trying to encourage deep learning with my students can be summarized as
follows: 1) Indecision on the part of my students which makes me wonder if they
really want to become ELT professionals because teaching is a competency that
needs to be developed; 2) Concentration problems due to the Internet and social
media, which commonly distract them from the core subject of a lesson; 3) the
lack of higher level of concentration due to multiple distractors that students
cannot cope with and that makes them shift their attention towards something
else; 4) the absence of some sort of participation willingness since learners
just expect to be spoon-fed with the info they just need to digest; and 5)
their child-raising backgrounds in which the spoon-fed way of studying was
strengthened.
These are just immediate challenges for the
teacher and for the learner, but how about the professional threats they will
eventually face? Let us take a look at the following issue: The need to learn
new competencies to excel in this new world full of distraction and distractors.
If learners do not learn how to cope with this problem, they are bound to have difficulty
to adapt to the demands and needs of the ELT profession (or any other
profession) because the learning of new competences is intrinsically connected
to the dealing with distractors that can affect performance at work.
Best
Teachers Institut. (2010, Sept. 29). What Promotes Deep Learning. Retrieved on
2014, Sept. 16 from http://youtu.be/XvJqNxPwbFM?list=PLaLDibSuk5T7-0wR66byWmA5RDo04koe6
Laureate
Education Inc. (2010). Learner Approaches to Learning. [Document included as
part of Certificate in Higher Education, Week 1, on their Blackboard LMS]
Learning
Teaching. (Atherton, J. S. (2013). Learning and Teaching; Deep and Surface learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 16 September 2014 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm
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