The start of the class was fabulous with activity of greetings. Then students delivered presentations on three approaches of English Language Teaching. I learned new concepts and cleared some misconceptions regarding structured pedagogy.  New concepts are

·         Difference between Teaching and Pedagogy

·         Difference between Objectivity and Subjectivity

·         Balance of power

·         Structured Pedagogy

Teaching is a small term, which includes teacher’s teaching style, the different methods of teaching s/he uses in classroom situation like Lecture method, chalk and talk method, grammar translation method and so on. Basically Teaching is a process in which teacher involves students in the process of learning. Whereas Pedagogy is a an art of teaching and it is a broader term in which teacher considers student’s background knowledge, culture and learning goals of curriculum and also uses different methods of teaching so that s/he can facilitate every learner in classroom. Every action of teacher is pedagogy because in pedagogy everything is connected to each other like, teacher’s standing  position, dressing, classroom setting or layout of classroom, teaching strategies, pointing out children, involving children in group and eye contact with children. Pedagogy may also includes teacher’s beliefs about learning, learners, knowledge, teacher’s role in teaching and learning process and also teaching approaches that s/he uses in classroom setting.

Objective standards are the standards which are completely unbiased or facts and they can be verified. It may consider as the policy, fix rules, and consider students as students in classroom. For example Students have to wear proper school dress when they are coming to schools, if student fails to follow it for some reason teacher may punish or send her/him home back. Whereas Subjective standards are completely biased or colored by the character of speaker or writer for example, a student used to ask questions in classroom from teacher and most of the time teacher fails to respond him/her, then teacher becomes subjective about him and starts ignoring that student. Some time subjectivity occurs when student belongs to teacher’s family or friend in result teacher gives fewer marks to that student. So we can’t point out to the subjective subjects they are only in our mind or our past experiences.

In learner-centered classroom the power is distributed in amounts proportional to student’s ability to handle it. For example most of the time teacher asks us how to distribute sessional marks, so it is also a balance of power because teacher is giving us a power to make decision about sessional marks. So in other words Balance of power creates friendly learning environment in which teacher and student share power. Classroom discussions, presentations, involving students in giving examples, brainstorming concepts and classroom projects are the few examples that can be fall in this term.

My group delivered presentation on Structured Pedagogy, which went awesome because teacher commented that presentation was excellent. But during presentation we delivered some misconceptions regarding structured pedagogy.  

Structured pedagogy is based on Socratic pedagogy which focuses discussion. Structured pedagogy follows the following steps.

DEMO----QUESTIONS-------FEEDBACK------SUMMERY of all contributed by students

Teacher firstly demo or present learning material in front of class and then involve students in questions (critical thinking), these questions are about the content after that teacher gives feedback to students. The last step of this structure is summery, teacher summarizes all the points of students and make sure that summery is the blend of each student's point.

All three sessions were engaging, I learned new concepts and hope to learn more things about teaching of English.