Week 5: Reflection

PBL: A Ray of Hope for Meaningful Learning

Every learning this week has been an exciting and eye opening experience for me.  I have found PBL. Alternative Assessment, Rubrics and WebQuests to be insightful and appropriate tools to enhance students’ creativity, critical thinking to problem solving skills. I suppose them elixir for learning to life. I mean real learning for the real world. However, they are quite demanding as the “teachers”   working for more than two decades in traditional classroom contexts and going for the retirement in the near future resist for change.

I strongly believe on appreciative inquiry approach. I liked the way alternative assessment enhances students’ “strengths” for language learning. Creating a learner centered classroom, it encourages independent learning as the performance tasks are “built around topics or issues of interest to the students”. It demonstrates learners’ abilitiesand encourages them with ample opportunities for integration.

I found Susan Gaer’s article Less Teaching and More Learning quite convincing and motivating. I’d like to reflect the following points in order to achieve quality product or performance in PBL:

1.       The instructor should explain the rationale and convince the students to start a PBL.

2.      Selection of meaningful topic or issue that interests the learners and it is agreed upon.

3.      PBL is encouraged not imposed.

4.      The instructor requires a complete understanding of learners’ skills and abilities.

5.      The learners make continuous practice for meaningful language development.

6.      Learners’ self- esteem gets enhanced.

7.      Active and positive participation of all the stakeholders ; instructors, learners, administrators etc. is required.

8.      It enhances group activity and motivates learners.

9.      It changes the traditional teacher student relationship etc.

 I feel that the point no 7 is more challenging in my case. Hopefully, I will be able to convince them and work for the change because we are simply killing our students’ creativity with traditional teaching practices.

Creating a Rubric in Rubistar has been a quite new and exciting experience to me. Rubric provides guidelines to both the teachers and students. I created story writing rubric for the first time. The URL is rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php?/screen=show Rubric&module = Rubistar& rubric-id = 2439308

Moreover, I’m planning to use a class blog to motivate my students in doing their home assignments.

Due to busy schedule I couldn’t earn extra points by creating WebQuest page. However, I read the article and explored it and enjoyed reading Ency and Wadha’sWebQuests. They are wonderful.

Every week’s journey is exciting and challenging for me. I eagerly wait for our instructor Donna’s next mail for sixth week!

Thank you wonderful learning community in yellow group.

Kiran

Nepal