Job Discussion Forums

[Roger]

Folks,
you all forgot the simplest reality - hardly any child likes to go to school, contrary to what "polls" might suggest (I am thinking of "opinions" from Chinese students!).
With half-rebellious learners we can't really know what they WANT, but we surely could find out what they NEED - ask the market (i.e. economic leaders who know what kinds of abilities and competen cies their employees need!).
Schools have to educate in a holistic manner new generations of future citizens/employees/enterpreneurs; not all of them need to know English, yet in the countries where most of us work English is a must, and as we probably all know (or suspect) any "must" is first rebelled against.
To make learning more worthwhile, we should - or the schools should - remove the obligation from students to take COMPULSORY subjects that could be done as electives. ENglish is one of those!
Because it is a compulsory one, we have to take care of the lowst achievers in the class. And that's demotivating both to us and to their peers who might be interested in learning the language differently.

[Scott in HK]

Going back to the first post, I think it is important to note that 'student centred' and 'learner-centred' teaching are not the same thing. Two quick differences would be that in a learner-centred teaching environment the class is thought of as a community of learners (this includes the teacher) using one or more 'experts' in a field to teach a subject. Obviously, the expert more often than not is the teacher. The emphasis is not on the teacher or the student but on the learning. The second major difference is that learner-centred teaching promotes explicit teaching by the classroom experts. That is to say, they expect the teacher (expert) to teach the students what they need to know to become experts in their own right.