Month: October 2020

When teachers try to create a safe and inclusive classroom, they should first consider the syllabus, course content, course preparation, teachers’ own behavior, and teachers’ understanding of students’ background and skills. The resources in this section provide specific strategies to meet these factors and enhance the learning atmosphere for all students. And promote learning by encouraging, prompting, interacting and exploring good questioning skills, such as “How do you know it’s right-can you tell me how to do it?”. Teachers provide 3-4 activities to solve multiple learning styles and let students make choices. For example, in spelling activities, students can choose to cut and paste letters from newspapers, or use magnetic letters to manipulate words. At a small meeting, teachers can provide many learning operations and opportunities for group learning. In an inclusive classroom, teachers will distinguish teaching content as much as possible, which will benefit students with disabilities and non-disabled students because it will provide more personal attention.

The main key to inclusive learning is that students need to be proactive-not passive learning. Teachers should encourage children to make as many choices as possible so that students have time to find some of the most powerful sources of learning, and learn from risks and mistakes.

The  pandemic has disrupted people’s daily lives. Schools are closed, parents are working from home or suddenly unemployed, and many people are affected by the ban on footing at home. People’s daily rhythms are all disrupted. With the spread of the Covid-19, how should teachers teach children? For example, in the class “Dinosaurs and the Environment”, the teacher can let the children share their ideal earth drawing through Zoom, and share their views on environmental pollution. Since they can’t go out, they can change the observation of the surrounding environment to their own yard or house. And also can let  the children to collect and share information about environmental pollution from newspapers and magazines.

What is heuristic learning?

The heuristic teaching method aims to prevent students from passively receiving knowledge instillation. It is expected that while leading students to think and solve problems, they will be able to enable students to develop a proactive learning spirit. There are many forms of heuristic teaching methods, as listed below Problem solving pedagogy and role play to illustrate.

(1) Problem solving method:
1. It is a learner-centered teaching method. Teachers no longer lead teaching, but become facilitators, guiding students to think and solve problems. When using the problem-solving method, most teachers do not directly introduce the teaching content, but provide a preset teaching situation so that students can actively search for answers in activities based on current knowledge and materials.
2. Teaching procedure: select problem→define problem→summarize data→solve problem

(2) Role playing:
1. Role-playing is a teaching method that combines personal intelligence, emotion and physical skills. In the process, participants can learn to play different roles, listen to the opinions of others and develop the ability to cope with advances and retreats. The advantage of role-playing is that it combines the functions of drama and games to increase learners’ empathy, and then generate confidence in handling conflicts.
2. Teaching procedure: preparation → brief question → interaction → discussion

How is heuristic learning connected to our Learning Resource?

The learning resource of my group is about elementary  education, and use the theme of dinosaurs to guide children to understand some knowledge and problems in life. For example, why do some dinosaurs eat grass and some dinosaurs eat meat? Why do environmental destruction lead to the extinction of dinosaurs? Use exploration methods to enhance their curiosity about dinosaurs and deepen their understanding of this topic. If they were dinosaurs, what would they do? How to protect the environment? And so on. So I think this teaching method is very suitable for our  blueprint.