UTILIZING TEACHING APPROACHES IN THE MIDSTS OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS by Prof. Liwayway Memije-Cruz “The great teachers fill you up with hope and shower you with a thousand reasons to embrace all aspects of life .” Pat Conroy, My Losing Season: A Memoir To be an effective teacher entails a lot of preparations, strong commitment, sincere dedication and good virtues. Without all of these, a teacher definitely cannot teach effectively and efficiently and won’t be able to easily transfer to the students what she wanted to teach and share with them or simply working on the learning and teaching process. Teaching before, which is from one to two decades now is entirely different from today. This is due to rapid globalization and technological advances. Students now are subjected into various forms of media and technological gadgets. With these, teachers should be regularly updated and trained so as not be intimidated by students who are more computer literate than most of them. Despite all of these technological breakthroughs, teaching should still be is more on touching lives. Teachers should willingly adapt teaching approaches which they deemed right or appropriate to the students they are handling. Being in the field of teaching for more than three decades now, I realized the importance of adapting teaching and learning approaches based on interdependence and on living and collaborating on a networked planet which involved the following: 1. Life-long learning, making learning a pleasurable activity for students from womb to tomb. 2. Learner-driven education, where the students are taught how to initiate and manage the learning processes. 3. Up-to-the-minute learning, where the staff-of-the-art, cutting-edge learning are made available to students through sophisticated educational and multimedia learning mediums such as distance learning. Modern technology means they can learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it and have online, real-time learning that is up to the play and not stuck in the 20th century. 4. Custom-made accelerated learning, where student’s unique learning differences (visual, audio, kinesthetic, right-brain, left-brain dominant) are taken into account, and learning modules will suit students with different thinking, learning styles and backgrounds. Promoting whole-brain thinking and development is of critical importance in dealing with new millennium change. 5. Transformational learning, helping students challenge and change belief systems and behavior (by their choice) to meet new needs and opportunities. 6. Synergistic learning, encouraging the student’s ability to see and work with their unique differences, using their strengths and weaknesses to complement each other. Team building, cooperation, collaboration, interdependence and community are values that need to be taught to enable them to work in many different types of teams, bringing true support. Community rights (like not smoking in public places) are part of this global culture. 7. ‘Making sense of our life’ learning, which means providing learning in an environment where learning is relevant to the experience and expectations of the learner. The context is critical. Community involvement and real-life experiences are important. 8. Learning to learn, which means that students need to know more about how they learn so they can improve their capacity to learn and think. True self knowledge such as this leads to practical self-realization (how to plan, manage and realize true success in life, from health to wealth and wisdom).
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 02:10:33 +0000
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