Master Oogway's wisdom

                   

For this week, I did a TEDed lesson called Master Oogway's Awesome Saying, it's a fun one, but also one worth deeper thinking about it. 

Language Learning Objectives:

Students will be able to:

·   Understand phrases and sentences within the conversation between Master Oogway and Po the panda.

·   Make use of contextual clues to infer meanings of unfamiliar words from context

·   Understand and discuss ideas delivered in this lesson.

·   Develop and ask questions appropriate about the listening context

·   Understand and respond appropriately to the discussion question by paraphrasing the ideas of the lesson and turn them into coherent and well developed stories of themselves.

The purpose of this lesson is to see if students could get the main idea of the wisdom quotes from Master Oogway at the end. This lesson is very short but very straightforward, it designed for advanced level Els in order to test their listening comprehension and critical thinking ability. It’s easy to test their listening comprehension by letting them do the multiple-choice questions, but how to get to know students’ critical thinking ability is tricky, for this lesson, I use my discussion question to make students think about how the lesson applies to them since it is a great way to create empathy and encourage learning by making it personal. With them telling stories of themselves I could evaluate how much they understand the lesson and by how they related it with their own experiences, and besides that, maybe they could even provide more wisdom saying or quotes to inspire us！

Hope you like the lesson, and, oh, here are some cute little ones~~

Flip my classroom for CLs

                     

When I’m already get used to traditional classroom, this flipped classroom approach surprises me with its creative idea of language teaching. Unlike the old classroom that ask students to do homework at home, flipped classroom does homework and activities during the class time instead, aims to improve students’ critical thinking ability with them interacting with peers and teachers. The two articles talk about flipped classroom approach mainly for ELs, but I think this approach works for other foreign language learning/teaching also, and I’ll definitely bring it to my Chinese teaching classroom in the future.

For Chinese teaching/learning, the most difficult part is the foundation, like 

Pinyin and radical, it’s hard to increase learners’ comprehension because it usually takes very long time of them to remember words’ pronunciation and tones, and how to write down radicles in right order, so if I teach these during my class time, it would take me hours and hours to give presentation based on my old experiences. However, flipped classroom helps me solve this problem easily by switching teaching and learning scenarios. I can make a teaching demonstration video and ask learners to watch them at home, so they would have enough time to either make charts or draw pictures or whatever methods they would like to use to help them remembering differences among Pinyins and radicals.

But I have a concern about the in-class part, since learners need to do activities collaboratively, then how do we teachers treat students with different reactiveness fairly? For instance, if the teacher ask students to do a fill-in-blank exercise as a group work, the students in fast reactiveness will finish the work really quick while students with slow reactiveness even don't have time to tell the difference between this and that, then can we say fast-react students are good learners but slow-react ones are not? I don’t think so, they need more time to think doesn’t mean their comprehension is low at all. Thus, I think we teachers really should take this into consider and so to design fit-for-everybody exercises in order to make fair and correct evaluation for every student. And only we put as much situation as we can into consideration while we are still exploring, can we really make flipped classroom a useful and helpful approach for language teaching/learning. 

Flipped Learning !

                       

I just joined a social networking group called Flipped Learning Network, such an interesting learning skill that arouse my interest. One of the parts that I like the most of this social networking group that I joined is the group section on the top of the website page. Once I clicked the “Group”, I found many interesting groups have different topics there, like Mathematics, Middle school, Mastery Learning, etc., I picked one called “First Time Flippers”, and I saw people’s posts in the forum and also others’ comment under them. The reason I picked “First Time Flipper” was I seldom had chance to really get to know about flipped learning, which a very interesting one, so watched some videos posted on it and also some people’s introduction or idea about flipped learning. Besides that feature, people can ask questions about flipped classroom, upload videos of related information, post new ideas to the forum, etc., so apparently this is a place that full of intensive information about its related topic. Like another topic I took a look at called World Language Teachers, which the whole world’s language teachers get together talk about lesson plan, course curriculum, flip conference, flip videos, and after a short surfing I already found some posting and videos that I would like to spend time to open. So as a new language teacher, who would like to create a professional blog about how to teach Chinese in the U.S., this social networking provides me a good guide to follow and also borrow skills from!

Here is the link of the social networking group I just joined, you can join it too if you are also interested! :)