Experiences

I am trying to work effectively for reaching an objective...

Kristīne Paškēviča

Latvia

Vocational School

ICT

Teaching in class, Extracurricular activity

Direct

When teaching a subject of natural sciences, Informatics, I face such difficulties as reduced ability of students to listen, think, and comprehend, difficulties of attention span, as well as even writing skills are not so good, and it the result thereof students often cannot take systemised notes so that it would be possible for them to do practical tasks in the further learning process successfully.
A student can be talented in other fields, for instance, in his or her profession chosen – working in a kitchen – while marks in general education subjects are average because of lack of the basic skills. One more important point affecting the learning process is that Informatics is learned from grade 5 to 7 only, but in the grades 8 to 9, the subject mentioned is not being taught anymore. In the result, when a student comes to a vocational education institution or secondary school, his or her knowledge of Informatics is very fragmented as there are many things forgotten in two years.
To eliminate the difficulties mentioned above, I organise my lessons in the following ways:
1. To increase the attention span and ability to listen of students, theory is combined with practical works (visual perception): the teacher acts together with students – during the activity, students write down the main idea, sequence of operations for execution of the relevant command, and together with the teacher perform the corresponding operation that is demonstrated by the teacher for the entire group. This is followed by different practical works executed by students independently or in cooperation with other students. Besides there is a possibility to ask for help the teacher thus making a feedback.
2. Lesson is cooperation-oriented and not competition-oriented as results can only be reached by cooperation.
3. Lesson is not organised according to the linear principle, and there isn’t one dominant type of communication – teaching and learning take place by help of spiral principle through implementation of systemic improvements and not through purposeless striving for execution of the mandatory curriculum without analysing whether the student has mastered the topic or not.
4. In the lesson, the teacher is a member of a learning team and not an enemy to others – we are learning together.
5. Control task results are used to understand how to improve the process of lessons.
6. In the lesson, the following learning style is established – students are learning from the teacher, their group-mates, and other sources.
When you start to work with students differently, result comes at once; achievements of students should not be compared to the rest of the students or to the average level of the group but to achievements of the relevant student in any of the previous learning stages.