TESOL Experience: We are teachers of the new generation!

First of all, I really enjoyed watching these videos, and I actually had some fun! After having watched “Educational Change Challenge” and “Pay Attention”, I start to think about the education systems today. I have never taken this issue seriously, because I still stay in my generation, in my old impression of the students. I’m not moving forward, but these videos told me that students today are totally different from those in the past.

There are several things that impressed me a lot in the video. In the first video, a question was proposed: What is school for? In the past, the school was just a place for a bunch of students to listen to the teachers’ lectures. They learnt what the teacher taught, and did what the teachers asked them to do. You need to attend the classes to make sure that you did not miss any information. However, schools are more multifunctional these days. And they do not have so many limitations, either. They are changing from one-room schoolhouses to one-world schoolhouses. Students can absorb more knowledge than before even without going out of their own bedrooms. They use the World Wide Web, and different instant messaging tools to exchange information all over the world. They are more precocious than students in the past, so they like to challenge the teachers’ authority sometimes because they consider themselves as adults. As a result, teachers should not insist on their old teaching concept and method anymore, because that may increase the distance between them and the students. We need to understand students’ culture, or there would be “no meaning if we are not where they are”.

During the next “Pay Attention” video, the video-maker proposed a series of questions that led us to think about the changes of students’ learning method. “How do your students learn?” “How much richness does your curriculum provide?” “Are you reaching them?” “Are you engaging them?” All of these questions are worthy thinking about. It not easy to satisfy today’s students, but that’s why we need to study their culture and try to work out some new systems to let them enjoy learning. Today’s students are expected to be creative, so our way of teaching should also be creative. Most of us have just started our exploration on using technology to teach, and we do not know how to use the high-tech tool wisely to accomplish our teaching goals. However, we have got a start, and all we need to do is to keep moving forward, and keep exploring.

There is one thing that I always believe, that is technology will never replace teachers. As human being, we have the ability to sense the students’ needs from a perceptual way, and we have the ability to give them the right guidance in time. Therefore, we need to do more research on how technology can help us to teach more effectively. Here I do not mean only to show some videos, download some articles, or use “Google Books” to introduce more books to the students, but also we need to see some other advantages that we can get from technology. In that way, we can learn to adopt some other methods which can make our class more vivid and advancing with the times. And that is how we make ourselves better educators.