In order to help teachers better carry out online teaching activities, innovate teaching models, serve teachers’ teaching development, improve the quality of online teaching, and play a regional radiation and leading role, the Teacher Teaching Development Center of the Teacher Education Research Institute has launched the “Online Teaching During the Epidemic Period· Wonderful ‘e’ Class” series of activities. In this news, we come to the 8th lecture - building a community of practice based on new philosophy of collaboration. The lecturer of this event is Liu Liyan, a teacher from the School of Foreign Languages.
Based on the New Concept of Collaboration, Build a Community of Practice
In order to promote the deep integration of foreign language teaching theory and English teaching practice in middle school, the lecturer attracts outstanding middle school English teachers and university teachers to form a teaching team to implement collaborative teaching; in order to exercise the collaborative power of the team, the lecturer organizes students to establish a community of offline teaching practice and make better the lessons together. The major characteristic of the “English Micro Teaching” is to highlight the importance of core values such as teamwork and peer interaction during the epidemic prevention and control period in this semester. How to give full play to the advantages of online teaching, promote the deep integration of online and offline, better implement collaborative teaching, give full play to the function of students’ community of teaching practice, and highlight the special significance of ideology and politics is the focus of this course’s teaching thinking.
1. Basic information of the course
Lecturer: Liu Liyan
Course Name: English Micro Teaching
Course Type: Required Course for Teacher Education
Start grade: Junior undergraduates
Majors: English
2. Display of key content
(1) Teaching philosophy
1. Online teaching: highlight collaboration. In collaborative teaching, university teachers focus on helping teacher-to-be students to internalize knowledge and form an understanding of English teaching from the perspective of language and culture; help teacher-to-be students to transform university subject knowledge and correctly understand the concepts, standards and content of middle school English courses. Middle school teachers help teacher-to-be students to externalize the knowledge, pay attention to the understanding of the cognitive level of middle school students they teach, and how to design effective classroom teaching activities based on the cognitive level of middle school students.
2. Learning content: ideological and matching. The students’ micro-teaching classes use the new teaching materials for junior and senior high schools from the People’s Education Press, and the selected teaching content generally matches the teaching content of the students during their senior year internships. Combining the themes and contents of students’ micro teaching classes, taking Bloom’s educational cognitive goals as the theoretical framework, and based on the concept of English teaching activities, the multilayered, deep and flexible class of “cognitive understanding-practical application-transfer innovation” teaching activities have been designed; What is also need is to dig deep into the ideological and political elements of the curriculum in the texts of English textbooks for junior and senior high school, and by discussing how to design teaching activities with ideological and political contact, enhance the value recognition of responsibility, teamwork spirit and dedication, and make the ideological and political elements implicitly integrated into the design of teaching activities to guide the development of students’ emotions, attitudes and values.
3. Learning process: establish a community of offline teaching practice. Taking the dormitory as a unit, students voluntarily form an offline practice community, and peers learn and practice through teamwork. In the community, peers maintain proper tension through interaction, so that all learners can realize their construction of value guidance and the meaning of knowledge. The community is not only a community for lesson preparation and discussion, a community for speaking in class, but also a community for mutual comfort and encouragement during psychological anxiety during the epidemic. The community improves the understanding of teaching and the ability to cooperate and communicate through face-to-face improvement of teaching content, teaching design, pre-class trial lectures, class recording, and after-class reflection. Before recording the micro-teaching class, the collision of each other’s design ideas in the pre-class improvement, the mutual encouragement and insight in the trial lectures, the hair-designing, makeup, clothing selection and active cooperation during the recording of the class are all reflected in the warmth of fighting against the epidemic with love.
4. Learning evaluation: pay attention to the value of the process and realize the integration of teaching, learning and evaluation. Online teaching emphasizes the importance of peer evaluation and self-reflection evaluation. The setting of reflecting teaching objectives, the design of teaching activities, and the language expression of teachers are the internal driving force for the development of teacher-to-be students’ teaching ability. Let students clarify the learning objectives, evaluation methods and standards of the course. While paying attention to the individual growth and development of students, attention should also be paid to its impact on the growth and development of partners and even the entire community of practice. Especially in the face of the epidemic, the cooperation and mutual love in the course of the improvement of course in the community of practice will be further considered and evaluate the significance of these influences accordingly.
(2) Teaching mode
During the epidemic, based on the integrated teaching mode of pre-class, in-class, and after-class, optimize the role of practice community and teacher collaboration before and after class, and realize the guidance of ideological value, the transformation of subject knowledge and the development of teaching ability.
Before class: Students design a teaching plan according to the selected teaching content, and rely on the practice community to carry out lectures, trial lectures, peer comments in groups, revision of teaching plan, and retry lectures in groups; submit teaching videos and teaching plans to the class WeChat group one day before class; After other students watch, they conduct group discussions and comments.
In class: Teachers in university and middle school take classes together, adopt problem-driven measures to lead students to analyze micro-teaching classes, and pay attention to how to tap into the ideological and political contact in the text.
After class: Students will conduct discussions within the practice community based on teacher feedback and peer comments, revise teaching plan and courseware according to the discussions, write teaching reflection logs, and submit the teaching plans, courseware and reflection logs before and after the revision within the specified time.
3. Teaching effect
At present, the “English Micro Teaching” course has formed a collaborative teaching team composed of a university teacher and four outstanding middle school teachers, established a relatively rich and complete student teaching case database, and accumulated a wealth of online teaching resources such as teaching plans, teaching videos, and teaching reflection logs. Through the deep integration of online and offline collaborative teaching, students’ practical teaching ability has been greatly improved.
The students believed that through collaborative teaching and the cooperative learning model of the community of practice, they could think about middle school class teaching from different perspectives; through the teacher-led and problem-driven micro-teaching class analysis, they had a profound understanding of the curriculum standards, teaching materials and activity design, especially in text interpretation and the design of teaching activities. The discussion, training, trial lecture, and reflection of the practice community promote the in-depth communication among peers based on the understanding of the subject.
The transition from experience-based teaching to scientific-based teaching is the professional growth of middle school teachers who participate in teaching. At the same time, the micro-teaching classes of teacher-to-be students and the comments of university teachers are used as learning materials for front-line teachers, which are published on the public Wechat account to encourage pre-service and post-service teachers to learn and grow together. University teachers will have a better understanding of how to interpret foreign language teaching theories in a more “down-to-earth” manner.
(From News Center, translated by Wei Jia, revised by Liu Lixin)