To integrate life competencies into the classroom

 

By Yin Nwe Ko

Athough it is not an easy task to integrate life competencies into practical classroom activities, the theoretical approaches are interesting to be learned. Here are some tips that may be useful and applicable to many teachers who are earnestly interested in modern educational attempts.

Learning to Learn

Learning to learn is all about helping students become better, more independent learners by helping them develop learning skills and strategies, take control of their learning and reflect on and evaluate their progress.

Greg, a researcher, suggests that you introduce students to different learning strategies. In the case of notetaking, for ex­ample, this could be a table, a spider diagram, or a note box. Over the course of a few lessons, get students to use each one, in turn, then evaluate which one worked best for them. If you are teaching remotely, you could ex­periment with different ways of presenting, for example, a new grammar point. Start by present­ing live as if you were teaching face-to-face. Then ask students to watch a video that explains the grammar point before coming to class. Finally, get students to read an explanation of the gram­mar from their coursebook or other materials.

Ask students to choose and discuss which method or meth­ods they found most helpful. You’re sure to get a range of an­swers but it’s not about changing your teaching style, it’s about stu­dents learning how they can help themselves if they are struggling.

Social Responsibility

The framework defines So­cial Responsibilities as the rights and duties that come with being a citizen of a particular nation or state and a broader global entity. This may sound like a challeng­ing thing to teach. But once it is broken down into core are­as, like understanding personal responsibilities within a group, intercultural awareness, and understanding global issues, it becomes easier to see how this competency can be incorporated into classes.

Will who is also a researcher suggests that you help students keep in touch with current news by dedicating a lesson or part of a lesson to the news. It’s important to do this regularly. Find articles from different sources on a news story that you think your stu­dents will find interesting. Ask your students to read the article and note down the most impor­tant information. You can guide your students by asking ques­tions like “When did it happen?”, “Who was involved?” and “Write what happened in less than 20 words”. Next, ask students to prepare to tell the class about the story by selecting and organizing the key information. When they share this information, students can discuss how this issue affects them and how they could make a positive impact on it.

Critical Thinking

We are all aware of the im­portance of developing our stu­dents’ critical thinking skills. With mobile phones at their fingertips (or in their pockets), they have more access to infor­mation and misinformation than ever before. In this era of “fake news”, our young people need to be able to separate reliable sources from unreliable ones, form their opinions and make choices with the best possible information available to them.

Greg, again, suggests using a ranking method to help students examine and evaluate their own opinions and help them be open to changing them. First, offer stu­dents a statement to discuss; one that is likely to produce a range of opinions like: “Make-up helps im­prove our image and, as a result, our self-esteem”. Using a topic that you are currently studying in class will help make sure that students are well-informed. Ask students to grade their opinions using a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). If you are teaching in person, you could even ask them to physically grade their opinion by arranging themselves along a wall.

Next, ask your learners to say why they believe that and to try persuading dissenting class­mates to change their views. Fi­nally, get your students to grade their opinions again to see if they have changed. This type of ex­ercise helps students practice evaluating their opinions.

Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is a vital life skill that enables us to im­agine, innovate and respond to unexpected or changing situa­tions. A traditional school cur­riculum does not always leave a lot of space for imagination or divergent thinking, and not all students will be used to thinking creatively in class. Therefore, we must give them a starting point for creative activities. You can use almost anything as a prompt for creative thinking; from im­ages and video to other stories, diagrams or objects.

Emma who is also another researcher suggests using a short story as a prompt. Choose a short story for students to read and respond to. Then adapt it by removing short sections of the story and ask your students to fill the gaps with their creative ideas. For lower-level learners, you can remove short sections like names, places, and activities. For more advanced students, you can remove longer sections, like descriptions and dialogue. Fi­nally, ask your students to share their stories with the class. You can turn this into a game by ask­ing students to guess what other students might have written. By doing this, you are encouraging students to imagine different ways the story might unfold.

Collaboration

Project work is a fantastic way to develop students’ collab­orative skills like communica­tion, teamwork, and leadership. It also helps develop other useful skills like doing research, making presentations, and speaking in public. The motivational aspect of project work is particularly important when many students are learning remotely. Getting students to work together, inde­pendent of the teacher, avoid­ing online classes becoming too teacher-focused, and encourag­ing students to take ownership of their learning.

However, classroom man­agement of projects can be very time-consuming for teachers. The challenge of coming up with an idea, gathering the right mate­rials, to make sure that students are all contributing fairly, can often make project work seem more like hard work!

The first step of any project is setting clear goals for students. In Will’s suggestion, he suggests that we get the students to decide what a successful outcome looks like and write it in the form of a checklist. Then, students plan the stages they need to reach their goal, referring to the checklist.

In the case of making a post­er, the stages could be finding pic­tures, designing the layout, and making the poster. Each of these stages could be broken down into further stages to make the pro­ject more manageable.

Communication

Getting teenage students to speak in class can sometimes be a challenge, especially if you’re asking them to speak English! Even the most confident student can feel self-conscious in another language, and for very shy stu­dents the idea of speaking in front of the class can be overwhelming.

 

It can also be a battle to keep students from slipping into their first language. Using the stu­dent’s first language in class has always been a matter of debate, but in this video, Emma suggests that it can be helpful for students to compare the speaking strate­gies that they use in their first language to the ones they use in English.

Ask students to record a vid­eo of themselves doing a role play in their first language. Then get them to record themselves doing the same role-play in English. Ask them to watch their two role plays back, comparing their use of eye contact, body language, and fluency. This allows students to use the skills and confidence they have in their first language to improve their speaking in English.

Studies show that over 60% of face-to-face communication is non-verbal. This is great news for language students because it means that even if they don’t understand every word, they can still guess and communi­cate meaning from things like tone of voice, gestures, and body language.

Moreover, I would like to share my practical experience associated with collaboration and communication here. I have two-year-experience with online classes equipped with Google Classroom since COVID-19 start­ed in our country. Although I did not have a face-to-face situation of education with my students in a classroom, I could manage them to do the project of essays and letters in the Google Class­room. They could have lectures of mine face-to-face position in Zoom meeting classes but it is not enough for their homework. Google Classrooms have solved this difficulty a lot. They were made to do the weekly projects of essays and letters. At that mo­ment, their endeavours can be seen vividly. They tried to write their essays with the PowerPoint app supported by suitable photos using interesting transitions and animations of the app.

Then they created their works as a video and made the necessary editions to it. Final­ly, they submitted their effort in Google Classroom. I have to download their videos and watch them weekly. Then I made some reviews on their endeavours and sent them in private comments together with their grades ob­tained. After several months of their doing projects, I have found that the power of their creations gets smarter and smarter. In other words, the more project they have to do, the more qual­ification they gain. In a project, they had to read necessary texts they searched for with access to the internet and create an audio-visual essay project. It can also be said that they could gradually integrate their life competencies into their virtual classrooms.

Reference: Teaching Teen 2022