As an international student from Asia, when I first came to North America to receive an education, I often felt that the teachers’ content was much less than my original education. Yet, I needed to learn a lot of things actively, and I always felt that the content of the exams was different from what the teachers taught. Through this week’s course, I realized that a large part of the reason is that compared to Asian education, North American education places more emphasis on the balance between active and passive learning modes, and I tend to prefer the latter teaching theory.
In active learning activities, students must interact with each other, the teacher, and even the learning devices, and they can receive timely feedback through their learning experiences. On the contrary, passive learning will not have such benefits. As the video Active Learning Overview mentions, passively accepting knowledge alone cannot achieve the teaching purpose because students do not think deeply and will not use associations or memory cues to elevate learning to the higher-order thinking stage. Secondly, as the main characters in active learning, students need to put in more effort to learn knowledge effectively, which requires students to have a strong learning drive to achieve teaching goals. Therefore, it is necessary to master the balance between active and passive learning in teaching and teach students according to their aptitude.
As for the teaching mode of scaffolding, I have deep experience as a Chinese tutor. For example, when students learn new vocabulary, as a tutor, students cannot directly memorize by rote but need to allow students to accept new knowledge gradually. For example, you can use videos to let students have a simple understanding of vocabulary. Then, let students connect the video content with their daily life to exercise their speaking ability. Finally, allow students to apply the newly learned vocabulary to different sentence patterns. By splitting the teaching mode of scaffolding, students can accept new knowledge more efficiently.
