NETS Reflection
Develops Reciprocity and Cooperation Amongst Students
I’ll be completely honest here; coming from a Business program in uni, when I started out I emphasized a lot of competition in my classes. My first teaching job was also in Korea where the students tend to be hyper-competitive (in my experience), so the students seemed to respond really well to rewards. Since then, I have worked in other environments and have seen how competition actually serves to de-motivate a lot of students; as a result, I’ve completely changed my focus to social and collaborative learning. My first exposure to the concept of student-centered learning was when I did my CELTA; these days most of my classwork is done in the form of collaborative projects and discussions and encourage peer feedback and teaching.
Giving Prompt Feedback
I think that I incorporate this into my teaching in a few different ways. First, I tend to have a lot more formative assessments than other teachers that I work with – this seems to motivate the students a lot more and allows them to work on skills so that they can actually see their own improvement. Also, I have students videotape each other with their tablets/smart phones during the formative assessment; immediately following the assessment I have them watch their videos and assess their own performance in groups. I then go over their feedback and explain to them the things that they weren’t able to pick out from their own feedback. Also, if I see that a large group of students are making the same mistake, I can then change the details for the material/assessment to try to fix it in the future.