Orientation Sessions

 

    Orientation sessions 

    25.08.2021-27.08.2021

The first day of orientation workshops was really confusing to me. It was the first time I’ve ever experienced hybrid method in teaching, which is the combination of online and face-to-face. I was waiting almost for two months to attend this course and meet teachers and other students. However, it did not happen. Since I had just arrived from my trip to Iran, I had to stay home quarantined. Therefore, I attended the class online.

Teachers did their best to involve us, who were at home, with the classroom’s discussions. And it worked, however, I missed some information and there were some gaps based on not a perfect audio quality.

When I got to know other students, I was excited to know what are their profession, hobbies, and purposes. I know we are going to learn not just from our teachers’ experiences and knowledge but also from each other. We have many different experiences and for sure have made many mistakes in our career. How wonderful it is to learn from each other’s mistakes.

We all are here to become qualified teachers. We all have teaching experience in educational setting and almost all of us agreed that how important our role as teacher is. In my discussion with other classmates we believed that teaching is not something that we just learn and do; it should be our passion. We have to have the willing of communicating with students with all our heart not just out of the responsibility. We agreed that good teachers are:

• Strong in communicators
• Listen well
• Focus on collaboration
• Adaptable
• Engaging
• Show empathy
• Have patience
• Value real-world learning
• Share best practices
• Life-long learners

We concluded that, even though, the educational systems are becoming more student-centered, still the role of teacher is undeniable.

From the first day of this program, I easily could see that the main approach in teaching is competence-based system. The starter was personal study plan, the interviews to know the purpose and timetable of each student, the assessment of  previously achieved competences and the prospective competences. 

Generally, the flexibility of the lesson plan and study time is bold in this program, which is another feature of competence-based approach in teaching.

The second interesting subject which we discussed was some educational terminologies which I have already been familiar with at least two of them.

“Pedagogy”.  What is it and why is it important? What is the best effective pedagogy?

To my understanding, pedagogy is the teaching itself. The teaching style, feedback, and assessment are parts of pedagogy. Pedagogy is also the relationship between learning methods and the teaching methods. If a teacher believes in a learning method different than other teacher, then they have also different methods in teaching. Pedagogy is the relationship between teacher and student. This is really important since it facilitates the path for students to build on prior learning and develop aptitudes and attitudes (Cochran, DeRuiter & King, 1993). There is not a single pedagogy to be considered as the best one. The most effective pedagogy involves various techniques, methods, approaches, like whole-class and structured group work, guided learning and individual activity. My pedagogy in teaching is based on life syllabus, where the teacher is not just transferor of the information related to the lesson. I believe all teachers in the world in any field should take their position for granted and teach life lessons. They always can arrange their syllabus in a way to teach at the same time the subject matter and a life lesson. This is what I do when I teach for example English grammar to my students.

As an example regarding implementing emotional intelligence skills in the materials, I show here one of the tasks which I presented in my upper-intermediate language proficiency level classes. I tried to enrich one of the existing course book activities by implementing one of the components of emotional intelligence (empathy) as the theme of the task. With a few simple changes it was possible to enrich this activity, which largely stimulates the cognitive aspects of learning, instead of emotions.

Original task:

Guess what Cassie will do in each situation. Write your answers in the spaces provided:

e.g. Someone on the street fell down and passed out.

Cassie will call an ambulance.

Cassie lost her bag.

..............................................

Cassie’s friend is late for their date.

.................................................

Now the enriched task:

Guess what Cassie will, firstly, feel and then do in each situation. Write your answers in the spaces provided:

e.g. Someone on the street fell down and passed out.

Cassie will feel nervous and call an ambulance.

Cassie lost her bag.

...................................................

Cassie’s friend is late for their date.

...................................................

In this activity, not only the present future tense is practiced, but feeling empathy is enhanced. This task makes language learners to activate the brain’s limbic part at the moment when they imagine what Cassie is feeling. Of course, I also asked my students, in one of my classes, to do the same task in the form of role play and make a dialogue about that. The result was wonderful!

The next term which we talk about was Didactic. I have always had problem differentiating between didactic and pedagogy. But I think I grasped the idea. Here is what I understood.

“Didactic”. What is it?

Didactics is an instruction which its core is science of teaching and instruction while pedagogy is concerned with strategies, methods and techniques (Eder & Hubka, 2005). I think didactic is more general and refers to practical applications in teaching. For example, in my classroom the didactics of knowledge transfer sometimes take place through PowerPoint presentation; of course it always depends on the context.

So far nothing was really new to me, until I heard about Vocational Pedagogy. I could guess what it might refer to. But it was difficult to know what would be exactly the difference between education and vocation. And yes they rhyme!

With the help of teachers, classmates and the presented supplementary materials, I could figure out what is vocational pedagogy and what is the idea behind it. And how does this system works in Finland.

“Vocational Pedagogy”. What is it and why is it important?

Vocational pedagogy is the decisions which vocational teachers take on their teaching and regulating their methods to meet the needs of learners in any profession they want to master and competences which they want to acquire. This is called VET (Lucas, Spencer & Claxton, 2012).

VET gives support to lifelong learning and developing students as human beings and society’s members. It is said that in Finland almost half of the students continue their education after the basic education in VET instead of general upper secondary education.

I think working as a vocational teacher is a big task. The teacher is faced with different students with a range of skills and needs and teacher has to make many different choices and take various decisions. All these choices are important to create competent workers for the future society. Our teachers in this program are vocational teachers and from the information which I have received now, I see how sensitive their job is. What they are doing is training other teachers who are also responsible for training students.

From the first days, our teachers started to see the teaching abilities in us. But this teaching was not supposed to be based on the old methods. We are now introduced to the main idea. And the main idea is competence. We need to put our focus into students’ competencies. Our teaching method should not be any more teacher-centered. It is students who are now at the center.

In the micro-teaching group task which we were given, first, we needed to come up with a lesson plan. It was really interesting to work with other teachers and see their methods and techniques. Lucky me or my team members :) I enjoy doing both team and individual tasks.

Our topic for micro teaching was: what are the traits of an ideal learner?

We first did the brainstorming to know how many features we can find for ideal adult learners. Then, we put them in different categories. And now the main part was the didactic. We used notepad as the mean of input transfer. We decided to ask students to write their own trait as an ideal learner. I always believe that to attract students’ attention to the topic and make them interested is by asking about themselves. People like to talk about themselves!

Our method for teaching was discussion based. And since we had only ten minutes to teach, there was not a chance to apply more methods or tasks. Happily it went pretty well for me except the time, which has always been my problem with teaching adults. With kids it is always easy to interrupt smoothly and wrap up easily the lesson. But with adults it feels like stopping a dam from flooding :)

We also learned more about Finnish education system. I had the chance to be in this system for eight weeks when I was doing my job practice as a part of Finland integration program for immigrants. I witnessed closely, at least, how Finnish elementary schools work.

Finnish Education System

Based on Finnish National Board of Education, Student counselling and special needs education is vital and core part of education.

In this system:

• Individual support for the learning and welfare of pupils is well accommodated, and the national core curriculum contains guidelines for this purpose.

• Special needs education is integrated into regular education as far as possible.

• Guidance counsellors support upper grade students in their studies and choice of further education

This law which every student receives individual support from school and teacher is really wonderful. I saw the way students were treated, cared and noticed when they had problem; and it did not matter if the problem was related to school or home. Teachers care! Even though, I was not teaching before in such a humanly profound system, still I always cared about my students. I put empathy and sympathy in the center of my teaching ideology. I follow the life-syllabus in my teaching and I feel really connected with this system of education in Finland. I do not know if teachers here just follow the law of General Support (Ministry of Education and Culture) which presented in 2011 in Finland or it comes from their heart, still I believe teacher cares. And I just do not want to teach the English language to my students, I also teach them life lesson as the core theme of each lesson.

However, if this General Support was not enough, the next step is Special Support.

It requires an administrative decision.

• A document is needed: how to arrange studies, what support is needed, how to make the school personnel committed, etc.

• Cooperation between home, school and multi-professional team is very important.

Special education services and special psycho-social support are offered when students have disabilities, ongoing health problems, developmental delays, emotional distress or other severe causes. ( 630/1998, section 20)

The learning environment in schools here (Finland) is a whole story to tell. I have visited many schools in Oulu, doesn't matter if it was daycare, elementary school, or high school, every one of them felt like home! The first elementary school was so different with the picture that  I had on my mind. It looked like Windows XP compared to Windows 10, or a cozy nostalgic house compared to a modern skyscraper! All those simplicity were visible there. Nevertheless, I had to look deeper to see what makes this educational system to be known as one of the best in the world. The first thing which attracted my attention was the interior design. I did not feel at all that I am in the school. It was just like a fantasy house which I always had on my mind when I was a kid, decorated with colorful sofas and fluffy pillows, like a house made of candies and marshmallows (with lots of Ice-creams outside!). I saw real tents for the kids to get inside and lie down and read books or do assignments. Kids were moving around with no shoes on, yet not bad feet smell at all. How is that possible? (Still a mystery to me.) I let you know when I figure it out.😉

Learning environments are:

Physical - clean, peaceful, enough space etc.

Psychological - safe, no bullying, confidential.

Social - school and family together, good personal relationships within the work environment.

Pedagogical - alternate learning styles, variation in pedagogy, teachers’ training.

Cover photo recourse:

https://www.media-and-education.nl/publicaties/organisatie/crossing-borders-hybrid-virtual-classroom

References:

Cochran, K., DeRuiter, J. & King, R. (1993) Pedagogical content knowing: an integrative model for teacher preparation, Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4), 263–271.

Eder, W. E., Hubka, K. (2005) Curriculum, pedagogics and didactics for design education, Journal of Engineering Design, 16(1), 45-61.

Lucas, B., Spencer, E., & Claxton, G. (2012) How to teach vocational education: a theory of vocational pedagogy. London: City & Guilds.