Taken from http://www.minimalstudent.com/the-recipe-for-student-success-ingredient-four-a-curious-mind/
Capturing Students’ Minds
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.
School of English
Faculty of Social Sciences
Universidad Latina de Costa Rica
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Post 263
As
a college learner I had a very inquisitive mind, and even when I decided to go
for a master’s degree in education, I realized my mind has not changed at all
in terms of its inquisitiveness. But if I try to re-construct how my college or
my postgraduate professors used to construct their lessons to capture my
attention, I must confess that somehow many of them failed. That is, they were
not able to raise any interest towards a topic they were teaching on “automatic
pilot,” not really worrying if students were or not engaged in learning.
As
a faculty member I avoid teaching on “automatic pilot,” especially after
teaching the same course several times. To raise student interest I try to
always find new things that learners can try to improve the content of the
course and the kind of deep learning tasks they have to perform instead of having
to take exams that simply turns them to be regurgitating what the information
you tell them in class or what they find in their books. After taking a course
with Prof. Michael Krauss from Lewis & Clark University, it is imperative
that learners get something challenging and rewarding to develop themselves as
deep learners. Teaching in automatic pilot does not help the learning process.
The
act of teaching must always imply student learning, and somehow the needed
engagement to attain to achieving course objectives. Mindfully speaking, one of
the models for learning that I got hooked with a couple of years ago is Kolb’s
Learning Model because I like to have students move around their learning as
feelers, thinkers, doers, and watchers. In hindsight, and as a mindfulness
exercise, as a learner I moved around this model, and it provided me with deep
learning, critical and hierarchical thinking. I expect to see the very same
results in my students, but I must be certain to design and develop tasks with
new technology to help pupils attain deep learning.
Based
on this, for the sake of my teaching and my students’ learning, I give students
the chance to think and feel what they need to learn. And by means of watching
and doing they can realize that newly acquired knowledge can become skills, and
those skills can turn into competences they can use at work. Helping them
become mindful of their own learning process by having them work on Web
2.0-enhanced lessons, they can reflect on how useful it is what they are
learning for their future or current careers.
Sunday, May 01, 2016
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