5th - How can someone give effective feedback to his/her students?

Feedback is a special and important tool in the teaching learning process, not only because it helps the teacher to asses the students process, but also because it helps students to improve in their four skills.

We can have two types of feedback: Negative feedback and Positive feedback.

We can provide feedback to our students orally and written. One way to give feedback in an oral way is trough Improvement comments. Personally, I like this technique because it avoids any grading or scoring of work and concentrates on the success and improvements in the areas we are going over. But we also can give feedback in a written form. Written feedback has the advantage that the student can refer to it over and over again. With oral feedback, students usually forget what they have been said. 

Some characteristics of good feedback are: 

1. Tangible and Transparent

2. Goal-Referenced

3. User-Friendly

4. Consistent

"Feedback is the breakfast of champions"

- Ken Blanchard

4th - What are the purposes of teacher’s classroom questions?

Many students think that teachers tend to ask question just to provoke the, or to make the feel embarrassed. To make them feel they do not know a thing!! Bun in fact, it is not so… Questioning has many purposes, may be not purposes, we better call them aids. Questioning helps in a variety of ways, and we can number a few of them:

• It helps the teacher to achieve his/her goals.

• Questioning is a means of developing and extending student dialogue.

• It helps to involve students in the classes more actively.

• It develops critical thinking skills and inquiring attitudes

• It can be utilized as a review tool.

• Finally, it could be a tool to make students to look for their own learning.

Some tips to make your questions worthy:

• Ask clear question

• Ask questions of primarily academic nature

• Wait for the students answer, do not push them to rush

• Encourage students to ask and answer

• Use not only volunteering but also non volunteering students

• Demonstrate the students there is not such thing as stupid answers.

To sum up, I like this quote:

"A teacher's questions impact student achievement, retention and participation. They fulfill numerous instructional purposes including: assessing understanding, reviewing and summarizing, developing critical and creative thinking skills and inspiring interest and motivation."

 - Cotton, 1989

3rd - What’s your call on the following? Assessment in education must, first and foremost, serve the purpose of supporting learning.

Without assessment, education could not be measured properly. Even with assessment, education and learning is not measured properly… imagine if assessment would not exist.

It is an essential part of learning, and it is a clear support of learning. When students are told to talk about assessment, they immediately think about exams and evaluations, and for sure, they are afraid of them.

In this chapter number 3, the book mentions that we need or must put assessment due to it (assessment) helps, encourage and motivates learners to develop every single skill by their own. The new system of evaluation leads to this: the student to be independent.

The two most common types f assessment are Peer-assessment and Individual-Assessment. The two of them are equally and achieve the goal teachers want if they are done appropriate.

We need to assess our students for some purposes:

• Gives the students a idea of what the teacher expects.
• Helps the students to be aware f their learning.
• Measure (in some way) the learning of students.
• Tells teachers if they are achieving or not the goal they have set.
• If something is not working you can notice it trough assessment.

As I already stated, assessment is an important and immovable part of the teaching process learning.

2nd - University study requires students to take responsibility for their own learning, to be more self-directed, to make their own decisions about what they will focus on and how much time they will spend on learning both inside and outside the classroom. How can you get the students up to this point by the end of the course or the year?

It is for certain that the independent learning is not easy to manage and to accept. Most of us, most of students have faced the problem that they do not what to do or how to internalize the change between the university and their previous studies. We do not have to say that studying in a university is so much difficult than the other previous levels.

When students that have just gotten into the university are asked to develop some task with critical thinking (thinking outside the box), they face serious problems because they weren’t taught how to work without the help of a teacher. They will be surprised for all the work they have to do by their own!

And that doesn’t mean that the teacher will not help them at all, of course the teacher will help but he or she will be more a kind of a guide rather than a direct help.

Independent study is a step by step process, in which the student has to find the way through which he or she can acquired knowledge by his or her own. But all the responsibility does not go just for the student but also for the teacher. The teacher must work hard to get the students to learn independently at the end of a course. 

The independent learning will let the student to internalize the learning. When teachers let students learn by themselves, students become aware of their own learning.

The teacher have to encourage the student to learn by him or herself and from the very start, te teacher has to clarify that he will not do the student’s work, he will serve most like a guide.

That is a good start for going to the indendent learning!

1st - In your own words, explain how more interesting and innovating strategies can create a positive and challenging learning environment for your or someone’s students. ( Captivating Your Class Effective Teaching Skills, 1 Enlivening “A” Level teaching and learning)

When teaching, you have to pay attention to many details. It is not any new thing for us. Every single class will not be developing in the same way and if it is develop in the same way, it will not take the same rhythm and route as the previous one. 

That is why we have to use innovating strategies to keep the interest of the students and therefore let learning to happen trough a good environment. To begin, we, as teachers, have to keep updating ourselves, regarding to media due to this media will encourage and will take the attention of the students more easily.
 

Also, the chapter already read gives some clues to make the student feel comfortable in the classroom and for knowing how to control not only the time the teacher speaks but also the time the students speak. It sounds kind of contradictory or meaningless but it does have a lot of meaning. It says so, because the teacher, of course, has to give enough time to the students to participate, but also have to control of the time students speak, being careful that the most talkative students do not take too much time in their participations.

Honestly, this book gives a lot of helpful suggestions we can use to make our classes better.