Week 10 & 11- Active and Passive Learning

Hi MBender,

I am very impressed by your summary of active learning in useful ways, such as videos, interactive multimedia, podcasts, infographics and social media. Active learning ways can engage learning experiences and encourage students to actively participate in exploring the knowledge.

However, I did not think deep about the importance of scaffolding in teaching before. As you said, scaffolding can break complex tasks into smaller and more manageable steps. I totally agree with that especially for students of lower grades or ELLs . In my opinion, As the children’s level of comprehension and production increases, the adults move their output level slightly higher, just as construction workers build the scaffolding of a building higher and higher until the building is strong enough to stand alone. When it refers to teaching, it is the temporary assistance by which a teacher helps a learner to know how to do something, so that the learner will later be able to complete a similar task alone. For example, before the class, the teacher can show students a related video, and asked them warm-up questions. These scaffolding steps can arouse ELL’s interests in today’s class topics. And the scaffolding  is very effective for teachers to support beginning ELLs.