Second Week's Impressions

Hello,

How inspired will students grow to be if they sense their instructor's high expectations and responsiveness for all of them? Does this have anything to do with the objectives which march painstakingly long and hardly find noticeable outcomes? Many shortcomings in our national ESL curriculum intensify the dilemma when they impede having a unifying framework that defines the general skills or abilities that should be exhibited by learners who finish one grade and step into another.

This week rendered me a bit inhibited to reduce the procedure of formulating instructional objectives into mere ABCD formulas. Thanks to critical pedagogy which lent me a hand in perceiving my objectives as parts of more complex statements of educational philosophy. It remains bewildering hence to recognize my role and part in adding shades to early predetermined outcomes. “One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes,” Eleanor Roosevelt’s voices it out yet finds mere echoes in the empty rooms of designing sound syllabuses, techniques, and performance tasks which let our local curricular objectives walk and talk.

Another issue of concern for this week was how to employ straightforward web search methods to further reach out fruitful results. Thanks to Deborah Healey’s precious tech-tips. Now I can launch the safe and productive search with extra potentials to meet my expectations. Anyway, I have been thinking recently of what I can do (and how I can hence help my students) to rapidly and easily find information that is of authentic interest or value to me and them, without the need to battle through numerous extraneous web pages.

This course definitely offers "solutions" which are urgently calling for your pressing "problems", colleagues.

Hassan

Comments

  1. Robert ElliottOctober 15, 2010 at 1:20 PM

    Hi Hassan

    I agree with your ideas here, especially about reducing objectives into formulas. However, more and more administrative needs are requiring such formulas from educators, at least in the US. I look at it as a necessary hurdle. Sometimes it actually does help me more clearly think out what I am doing. But overall I think many things students learn are beyond reductionist objectives.

    Most importantly, I am glad you are finding solutions to problems.

    Robert

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