We finish with... Session 4

Hello people!!

In this new post, I’m going to explain an unusual activity we performed in session 4 of the course. I have said unusual because it was new for me and I think for most of my classmates too. This session was called the ‘Library class’, and with it we learnt different methodologies which we can use to teach literature in our English classes. 

We started the class by choosing a book from a variety of them that were placed in a row at the front. The majority of the books were English classics from some famous English authors like Dickens, Poe or Shakespeare, among others, and the level range was also varied. 

Our lecturer gave us the opportunity to choose the one we wanted so, once we all had one in our hands, we had to choose some methodologies from a variety of them that were explained in booklets around the class in order to create some activities related to some aspect of the book, and it could be intended to be done as pre-, actual or post-activity. The provided methodologies were: cooperative learning, collaborative learning, problem-based learning, task-based learning, project-based learning, games, simulation and role-play.

The book I chose was "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, and I did the task with one of my classmates. Before choosing the method we took a look to the different suggestions we had, and finally we decided to work with the Problem-based method as it was quite new for us and we wanted to have a try with it, and with the Collaborative method. Both are styles usually used with active learning which follow a student-centered pedagogy. With the use of both methods we wanted our students to work in groups and learn about a subject through the experience of problem solving. Therefore, the goals we could achieve with their use were effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation, so that’s why we found them a very good option to develop.

The creation of the activity supposed a challenge since we had not read the book before, so we had a quick look to it and by taking some ideas from the activities that were proposed at the end, we designed the following post-activity that include information and steps to follow in order to solve the problem:

Problem: Imagine that the animal fingerprints were not found by the police on Camille’s neck. If you were the police, how would you find the murderer?

Brainstorming – Hypothesis: In this step students would be split into discussion groups of 5 people each one, so they have to take a first thought about how to solve the trouble.

Re-structure the problem: Here, the groups would have to throw the irrelevant points away and organize their members to look for possibilities.

Solution of the problem: At this point, students would have reached an agreement so they would have created the alternative or solution.

As a conclusion, I can just say that this session was very positive for me; I learnt lots of methodologies and strategies to use as a teacher, both to teach literature or other language fields, since all of them can be applied to achieve any linguistic point, just the teacher has to be conscious and has to know how to apply them successfully. 

The “library class” strategy can be very appealing for students since it becomes an active way to explore a book or a short story before or after reading it. Unlike the traditional way of reading a book at home, this strategy can engage students into reading, so I think that the use of these active strategies by teachers should increase considerably.

Therefore, the active participation makes students to get involved in the teaching-learning process easily when the teacher is able to encourage them with information related to their interests and daily life, so this fact should be taken into account by all language teachers.

This has been all for now!!! See you on the assessment part!!