School Visit: Defence International Training Centre

The school is an Australian Defence Force training unit, with students there learning to be English teachers. We stayed in the classroom and learned with the students. The teacher has adopted a number of teaching strategies, which will be analyzed as follows.

The teacher always walks around the classroom to monitor the learning situations of the students. This is very important in helping students learn since they may come across a variety of problems when doing tasks. Teachers will be able to identify their weaknesses and then assist them in obtaining the correct answers. Moreover, teachers can set appropriate levels of tasks in future to cater to individual differences, which is effective for motivating them to complete and improving their performance.

Moreover, the teacher always elicits responses from students instead of giving them the answers directly. This is a student-centered teaching methodology, which encourages the students to think of the answers themselves. This helps the students learn effectively since they are able to apply the knowledge acquired to new situations and gain new information from their mistakes. If the teacher does not teach in this way, the students will become passive learners and they will not be interested in searching for answers and other relevant information themselves, they will simply wait for the teachers to “feed” them, which makes themselves become more and more dependent upon teachers. The effects are far-reaching, for example, the students absorb all information without digestion. Teachers do not always offer correct solutions, it is possible for them to make errors. If the students do not process the information received, they will acquire incorrect knowledge which impacts on their future prospects. Therefore, teachers should always put their students at top priority.

The teacher has not done perfectly in managing tasks. In the lesson, she asked the students to complete a worksheet with their partners. This is appreciated since they are able to learn with their peers through completing tasks together. However, the teacher failed to make all students work all the time. As there are individual differences in a class, students finish the task at different speeds, so those “faster” students went off-task after completing the work. To remedy the situation, it is recommended that teachers should set extended tasks for each lesson so that all students will not idle their time and the time for learning will be maximized.

In Hong Kong, it is common for teachers to adopt traditional one-way teaching, meaning they do most of the talking and cram much knowledge into students’ brains. This does not motivate students to learn. Instead, teachers should maximize student talking time, which is, maximizing their participation in classes. It is suggested that Hong Kong teachers should take the methodologies adopted in other countries as reference and extract those which facilitates learning and apply them to classrooms whereas those weaknesses should also be taken into serious consideration－reminding themselves not to make such mistakes which impacts on effective learning.

(Number of Words: 500)