Kumar 1 & 2

          Chapter 1 mainly talked about the three different ways a teacher can take on the task of teaching their students; teachers as passive technicians, teachers as reflective practitioners, and teachers as transformative intellectuals. In all of them there are pros and cons that I found throughout what a teacher is supposed to do in each scenario.

            I found that teachers as passive technicians had some qualities of what teachers should be doing in the classroom today. Teachers that take on this type of teaching are measured by how well they take in the knowledge and then whether they effectively give the knowledge to the students. In this type of a classroom, the teacher is considered a conduit. It is important to figure out what the student comprehends from the knowledge the teacher gave to them.

            Although I believe that teachers are responsible for relaying knowledge to the students and it is their job for the students to comprehend what is being taught, I also believe the students can bring knowledge to the table as well. Students have personal stories/experiences that can help themselves and other students connect to the topic they are discussing in class. Also, I think it is important to have the students interact and connect with what is being taught in class, so the teacher is not the only one relaying information to all of the students.

            The next way was teachers as reflective practitioners where the teachers are seen as problem-solvers. Teachers are required to think critically and imaginatively in this process. In this method they talked about two different actions that can occur: reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action. Reflection-on-action is where the teacher makes a lesson plan and then decides after how effective their teaching was to the students. Reflection-in-action is when teachers monitor their ongoing performance and randomly adjust their teaching.

            One quote I loved from the book in this section was, “learning to teach doesn’t end with obtaining a diploma or a teaching degree but is an ongoing process throughout one’s teaching career” (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). Even though there are many different methods and ways to teach students in the classroom, I believe that learning for a teacher should never end throughout their teaching career. I have heard many stories where once a teacher is “secure” in their job they stop caring about the curriculum or changing their lesson plans in any way and they only care that their job is secure.

            The third way was teachers as transformative intellectuals where the teachers had two tasks: they want educational advancement but for personal transformation. This way also seemed more realistic in the way that they would construct a curriculum and syllabi based on their students needs and wants. In this situation, I believe that is one of the most important things to do when teaching. Your job is to teach the children and by making the syllabi around them, everyone can succeed and do well in the classroom.

            The only question I had after reading this question was “why can’t we pull all of these ways of teaching together and make something that works?” This was similar to last week where we talked about how you can’t make one perfect method. There will never be a perfect way to teach the children, but we can continuously work to help the children succeed which is our ultimate goal.

            Chapter 2 of this book discussed a lot about methods again and how there is never going to be one perfect method that works for every teacher, every student, and every classroom. It began to talk about how the eleven methods we talked about last week can be clustered together into three topics: language-centered methods, learner-centered methods, and learning-centered methods.

            The language-centered method was closely into relation with the audiolingual method. This methods concern was the students would grasp the grammatical structures of the language. This method developed more intentional learning rather than incidental. The teacher’s job is to teach the grammatical structures, so the students can internalize them. As discussed before, each of these methods have something in them that I would take to make my own teaching method, but not one method is going to work on my students.

            The learner-centered method was closely in relation to the communicative method. This method was concerned with language use and the learner’s needs. This method gave the learner the opportunity to practice communicative functions such as speech acts. This method gives the learner the chance to practice their communication skills and more specifically a specific function. The main goal is to get these language learners to have accurate grammar and they become communicatively fluent.

            In my high school years of taking a language, I found that their main goal was not to have us become communicatively fluent. We spent most of our time working on grammar and forming sentences, rather than learning how to speak the language fluently. It is difficult to move forward with a language when you cannot fluently speak the language because you are focusing on the grammatical issues of the language.

            The learning-centered method was closely in relation to the natural approach. This method allowed learners to participate in meaningful interaction through communicative activities in the classroom. The learners in this method learn through communication, but language development is more incidental rather than intentional. All of these methods had some similarities with a few changes to them.

            I believe what was brought up in the limitations of the concept of method that is how there is not going to be one perfect method. It also talked about how the term method is being diminished. I think there should not be a method or the word method because it has people/teachers believing that there is one way to teach your students which is far from the truth. This article left me questioning how we should approach teaching if there are not methods to follow. Does everyone form his or her own way of teaching?