Redesigning One’s
Lessons:
The
Importance of Reflective Teaching
By
Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Friday,
October 3, 2014
Twitter:
@jonacuso
Post
152
When it comes to reflective teaching,
one needs to sit down and analyze why a lesson went right or went wrong. Beyond
the success one may have had while teaching a class, -and as my colleague
Arturo Muñoz used to tell me, “There’s always room for improvement,” an
instructor can always find ways to increase student participation in the one’s
classroom.
Last week, while reflecting upon my
Introduction to Drama class at Universidad Latina (in Costa Rica), Arturo’s
words started coming back to my ears: How can I improve student participation
in my class? Besides asking this rhetorical question, Professor Roger Núñez’s
teachings in methodology came back to me, too: Why not to incorporate
additional reading and writing techniques that can benefit student deep
learning and more active participation in class?
My Introduction to Drama planning
started out with the following objective:
Now,
what steps can I now take to direct my teaching to even produce better results
with future students taking this literature class? Well, this is what I came up
with based on my former training in reading and writing methodology:
·
Dense Questioning, and
·
Inferential Reading.
Dense
Questioning is a reading technique that can be used
while students are reading a text, such as Oedipus Rex, and can
·
Interpret and synthesize recurring
themes/ideas
·
Pose personally relevant questions about
texts
·
Relate new information to prior reading
and/or experience by making text-to text, text-to-self, and text-to-world
connections
(Greece Central School District)
Though
I tried to somehow integrate this in my plan and class time with students, I
should worked more on it to make them go deeper and deeper into the recurrent
themes that can be found in Oedipus Rex.
Inferential Reading is another
technique in which we have students exercise their critical and hierarchical
thinking skills. As its name suggests, students are faced with the fact that
they need to read between lines to get to the gist of the topic or question.
While students work on this, they can
·
Draw upon prior knowledge
·
Draw conclusions and make inferences
·
Recognize the effects of one’s own point of
view in formulating interpretations of texts
(Greece Central School
District)
Inferential
Reading can make use of cyclical-spiral organization of the content that needs
to be covered and explored in a course like Drama. Not only does it give me the
chance to recycle content, but it can also allow students to get deeper and
deeper into their reading and learn from it the more they connect to it.
Both reading techniques can help a
teacher to prioritize the teaching of strategic content that needs to be
mastered by students by the end of the class or segment of the college term.
The two strategies can help the instructor choose an organizational strategy to
cover key elements of the course outline and quite relevant for the
understanding of later topics that need to be addressed. And bearing in my that
one needs to plan for student needs and not for one’s own sake, Inferential
Reading and Dense Questioning can be of great use to maximize student
participation in class and will help learners boost their text comprehension
and interpretation.
Greece
Central School District. (n.d.). Reading Strategies: Scaffolding Students’ Interactions
with Text. Retrieved on 2014, October 3 from the Greece Central School District
at http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/academics.cfm?subpage=930
Laureate
Education. (n.d.). Planning for Learning. Retrieved on 2014, October 3 from http://mym.cdn.laureate-media.com/2dett4d/LIU/LCTL/0001/03/mm/planningforlearning_english/index.html
Pronunciation
Development
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Reading Skills
Development
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Curated Topics
Online
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Tolentino,
L. (2014, July 4). Principles of Learning. Retrieved on 2014, October 3 from
the Slide Share webpage at http://www.slideshare.net/darlynne16/principles-of-learning-36634677?related=1
Friday, October 03, 2014
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