Academic Listening and Speaking in Small Groups
October 16th 2013
I am always in admiration of teachers that can keep an energetic dialogue going in their classes. I enjoyed what this chapter had to offer in terms of different activities and techniques to keep students equally engaged. In my experience, especially in older grades, the classroom was, for the most part, teacher led.
An example that comes to mind that involves two of my biology teachers in high school. One had been teaching for years, and had a very lecture based style of teaching. She would often put up pre-prepared notes on a PowerPoint and read through them while we copied her notes. This was done on a regular basis, and was quite a dry, formal way of presenting the material. My other biology teacher was extremely personable and funny, through his humor he could connect well to a large group of students, keeping them engaged in the material for the majority of the class time. Although they had very different classroom dynamics and generated different atmospheres, their teaching tactics were relatively similar: both lectured for the majority of the time.
During my education, discussion based learning in small groups within courses such as science and math were often very limited, if present in the curriculum at all. They were much more common in classes such as English and Social Studies, but I wonder if some of the attributes of discussion based learning can be effectively applied to courses outside the humanities. I can definitely see the merit in this type of learning especially for ELL students or even those who are not comfortable speaking in front of the larger class. Developing academic language, as we’ve seen, is not simply limited to the courses in the humanities such as English, and disciplines like Science and Math have very specific academic languages with many brick words and technical terms. To more fully facilitate the development of this type of language, students need practice not only hearing, but using and applying it; in this small group activities can be an effective means to encourage participation and practice.
Kathy