Figure 1: Students taking a break

Senegal

In Course 2 you'll explore:

All for the purpose of applying what you learn to classroom lesson planning and practice.

Resources

Course material; Conversations with global colleagues.

Assignments

Assignment 1: Generating Themes

Assignment 2: Cooperative Learning Groups

Assignment 3: Reflecting Upon Instructional Theories

Assignment 4: Reflecting Upon Curriculum

Assignment 5: Students Learning About Learning

Assignment 6: Your Classroom Management Plan

Assignment 7: Lesson Planning with Cooperative Learning in Mind

Assignment 8: Journal on Implementation

Assignment 9: Critical Questions

Assignment 10: Effectiveness of Course Two

Timeline

4 weeks

HOW TO GET THE BIG PICTURE:

As you proceed through Course 2, use your "Outline" button to get an overall sense of the topics covered in this course. (The "Outline" button is on the right-hand side of this screen under the blue, horizontal bar.) Review the topic titles listed. Read through the assignments first to see what will be asked of you. Knowing what comes next will help you to become an active reader - engaing with the material. You may even find yourself wishing to take notes as you read. You can take handwritten notes or "copy" and "paste" sentences that stand out for you and "save" them in a file on your disk or hard drive. This interaction with the text will help you to take in the richness of the text and the assignments.

Students learn best when their minds are engaged and their bodies are moving. People learn through experimentation with the real world, rather than by memorizing a list of rules. This statement has implications for the design of instruction. Learning opportunities should be based, as much as possible, on real tasks and rich environments, and include opportunities for reflection and application.

This course will provide theory and practice so that you can make your classroom a lively, interactive, and safe place for exploration and learning. You will be introduced to ideas such as thematic learning and cooperative learning and have a chance to develop lesson plans with these ideas in mind. You will be given practical tools for classroom management and ways in which you can guide your students to think about their own process of learning.

Required Reading:

Accelerated Learning

PDF File:

Accelerated Learning

Scaffolding is a term that one would normally associate with buildings - the structure outside, allowing workers to crawl around and construct the building. It is also a way of providing these same workers with materials so that ropes and ladders can haul building materials to higher and higher levels. Without a proper scaffold, the building is faulty, subject to collapse from its own weight or from a natural disaster. In short, the building will not last.

We must think about education in the same way. For lessons we teach, we must create a scaffold - a set of steps, a structure, a set of tasks and expectations, a way of determining if we are on the right track and if the structure is sound and strong, and requires that we feed that structure with the materials and resources we need.

In designing a lesson, we should think about a scaffold.

For more information on scaffolding, click here .

For examples in practice, click here .

Lesson planning is not complicated. It's simply a matter of creating a clear plan around the following:

Objectives

What am I teaching?

Who am I teaching?

How will they learn?

What will bring it to life?

Selecting Learning Materials

Script the lesson.

Connect the lesson to the requirements.

Evaluate your students' intelligencs.

What are the tasks and processes, and in what order?

Organization

Prepare the props and the materials.

Vary your teaching methods to meet student needs.

Decide the level of engagement and questioning.

Discuss your plan with your students.

Evaluation

Decide what you will monitor.

Decide how students can demonstrate what they know.

Discuss with students how they did on the assessments.

The theories and practices described in Course 2 complement the above ideas while at the same time deepen the notion that students are active participants in the learning process. In the next few sections you will not only learn theories and methods of teaching, but you will have a chance to apply what you learn to your classroom experience, and discuss ideas with your global colleagues in the TWB Learning Cafe.

HOW TO GET TO THE NEXT MODULE:

Usually, you just click "Next" to go to the next page. When you finish a section, however, (as you're about to do when you finish reading these two paragraphs), you need to click on the "Outline" button, which is on the bottom, right-hand side of the page. Look underneath the blue bar and click on the word "Outline."

When you click on "Outline," a screen will come up that will show you the outline for Course 2. Look for the next section to read and click on the first topic in that next section. For example, when you get to the outline now, look under the next section called "Instructional Theories" and look for the first topic in black lettering called "Thematic Learning." Click on "Thematic Learning."