Chalkboard Writing for Students
No doubt, cooperative learning has produced more and more students who are independent and can think creatively. However, from my point of view, it should be done in moderation, as doing too much of it will kill its novelty, making students lose interest in the long run. Besides, slow learners tend to be passive throughout group discussions, hardly anyone addressing their learning issues.
Although chalkboard writing is discouraged at schools, sometimes, there is no harm for a teacher to use this approach to point his or her students in the desired directions. For the period of eight months, having been involved in countless group activities, Alan's students showed little progress in writing, repeatedly making a lot of stubborn errors. To address the issue, one day, the English Language teacher came into the classroom without any aids, and asked his students to produce a class composition by getting each of them to come up to the front and chalk a sentence for a story beginning with: ‘It was a sunny day….'.
At first, a few students insisted on not writing anything, scared of the possibility of being laughed at and rebuked. Alan did not impose his will on them and let the more confident students contribute sentences, heaping praise on them. To add humor, Alan allowed the students to be creative with their ideas. As the activity progressed, more and more students joined the fun, the good ones writing longer sentences while the average student wrote shorter sentences.
When the story came to an end, Alan set aside twenty minutes for peer editing, an element of cooperative learning. In the initial stage, the volunteers were few, mostly the good ones. To encourage active participation, Alan had to keep convincing the students that even if their editing was not right, it was part of learning. After some time, the small number of students who had not contributed anything earlier on tried their hands at editing, and Alan showered them with praise. Then, magically, almost everyone in the classroom clamored to do the job. Throughout the whole process, as you may have noticed, Alan was playing a very active role, moving around and encouraging the students, a far cry from the subdued role of a teacher in cooperative learning.
From different types of feedback, Alan was able to tell how every student perceived and executed the uses of various grammatical items. When the session ended, Alan did an overall edit, explaining how different grammatical items operate before having the students copy their final version.
From that day on, after a few weeks of cooperative learning, Alan sets aside a period or two for doing chalkboard writing and editing with his students, enabling them to address their weaknesses and overcome them, thus becoming more confident in managing group activities.
Although cooperative learning is important, sometimes, a teacher has to do some chalkboard writing with the students to reinforce their absorption of knowledge and skills so that they can move along the right track of learning. After all, cooperative learning and chalkboard writing are part of the many teaching methodologies available, and both compensate for each other with their strengths.
Comments