This week’s topic of challenged-based learning was just so interesting and made me really start to think about how I could try and make things different in my classroom. When writing our UBDs (curriculum design) we always start with our essential questions and then our learning, topics and themes emanate from there. With challenged based learning, it seems that this same process is followed, except that different groups of students would each adopt a question as opposed to the whole class answering all of those questions collectively as a whole. I would love my students to be able to reach out to those in the community and build ties overseas, and for my more advanced students this would totally be possible, but not sure how that would work out for my French 1 students, being that they have a very basic level of understanding. I am wondering if there are any other foreign language teachers out there who may have successfully used this method, and how they went about it with their more basic level students.
CBL and Culturally Responsive Teaching are really linked as topics. The key is that they both envision a community of learners where student and teacher relationships are totally redefined. They provide challenge to stimulate brain growth and connect new content to culturally relevant examples from the student community. They give authentic opportunities to process content, they make space for student voice, they build classroom culture and learning around talk and task structures and teachers support each student to take greater ownership for their learning. According to Dan Pink, autonomy, mastery and purpose are the building blocks of a new era of learning. He believes that engagement needs self-direction and that the secret behind high performance is that people do things because they matter. In the project that we were shown, all of these things would come into play. Students were well motivated as they worked independently in groups on one part of the project that they had chosen to work on. They knew that what they were working on would affect other communities directly and would make a difference. They organized bake sales and book donations as part of their study and monies/books were sent to these other communities that they were supporting. The research that I am currently undertaking really only deals with language acquisition through the App Quizlet, so in this case I’m not sure how challenged-based learning could affect my study. With flip-based teaching, I could certainly make screencasts for my students to view at home introducing new grammar points and vocabulary and then practice more with Quizlet and other activities in the classroom. I would be really interested to meet other world language teachers to see how they may have used CBL within the confines of a foreign language classroom, especially for beginners. The benefits that this methodology could offer seem huge.
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AuthorI am a French & Spanish teacher at Justin-Siena High School wanting to get new ideas to motivate my students. Archives
March 2019
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