Let me take you back to your school years for a moment. Who was your favourite teacher? "The old" soldier-like Maths teacher who was very strict in the class or "the young", friendly Literature teacher who was always open to all kinds of ideas, even to the extreme ones. I can hear you screaming the answer. “The latter one”
There are a lot of views regarding education and its purposes. If our goal is only to produce good students who will study to pass the exams, learn what they have to learn without exploring all the other possibilities and cause no problems to us, then it won’t be a difficult issue to educate them. If, however, our goal is to produce well-rounded, cultured gentlemen and ladies who are open minded and capable of solving the problems they faced in the real life and to make the things they learned during their education at school meaningful, then the means of education will be much more complicated.
In this context, it seems really hard to decide which method/theory is better to apply. There are 2 different ways of thinking on the education; Traditional or Modern Methods? Both sides of the issue tend to fling mud on the other side. So, traditional and modern concepts can be seen as opposite because of misunderstanding and misconception, then which of the two assessing methods would be most efficient to give our students a better education?
Modern, progressive education sometimes causes our denying or ignoring the souls of the students. Our students study not to learn something new but to pass the exams. The brain, thus, works as a sort of computer that stores data only, but if we ignore the souls of children and so remove love from education, what do we get – modern, progressive, dumbing-down education in which the students have the fear of failure. Because of this pressure they may feel desperate and it’s a well-known-fact that when the students feel secure they become more successful.
On the other hand, traditional ways of teaching have a lot of handicaps. The teachers generally shoulders too much of responsibilities for teaching in the classroom to make sure everything they taught were understood by the students. There is a typical way and controllable class where the teacher will teach on the blackboard, explain, ask students to copy and make sure students pay attention and listen. In this kind of education, the teacher becomes the centre of classroom interactions, and the students can’t play an active role. Instead of being the dominating authority in the classroom, the teacher should facilitate the communicative process among the students. Any unnecessary intervention on the teacher’s part may prevent learners from becoming involved in the activities and thus hinder the development of their communicative skills.
If children shared only similar physical and emotional characteristics and expectations, it would be easy to motivate them and one method would be enough may be, but we are aware of the differences among our students and modern education has a goal to fulfill the individual needs, interests and capacities of the students.
In order to cultivate students’ innovation and learning effects, a variety of teaching methods should be applied to inspire and guide students involved in learning process. With the help of modern educational technology, the traditional lecture style and across-the-board teaching methods have been changed to individualized teaching methods and the closed classrooms are opening now.
In this context, Comenius project is a big opportunity for us to give our students a better education because the students will be able to communicate without the fear of failure. Peter Sacks’ “Sandbox Experiment” is a good example for this situation. He, as a teacher, thought that if he made the classroom similar to a playground, the students would become more willing to participate in the teaching-learning activities. Sacks stated “I’ll call class the “sandbox” and we will play all kinds of games and just have fun. He called this “The Sandbox Experiment”. He also had an approach that he called ‘Collaborative Approach’ where he didn’t act as he knew more than the students.
For the students who are learning English in a non-English-speaking country, there is a little chance for them to learn an acceptable form of English outside the classroom. In language teaching, it is important to provide opportunities for our students to engage in real-life communication in the target language, otherwise it won’t be meaningful for them to learn or speak English. The comenius project will give the teachers and students this chance, they will also have a really big “sandbox” to play in, learn something new, meet new people and share their ideas without the fear of getting low marks.
It is clear that modern education technology changed people’s traditional education idea. It changed the single teacher and student relationship in the past into relationship of teacher and student, student and teaching resources, student to student and the change of education elements became a positive contributing factor to the development of education itself. However, it mustn’t be forgotten that modernization process in education is a result of countless experiences. As human mind evolves, his perceptions, approaches and reactions evolve on many areas too. So it is very natural to notice many changes on teaching and learning methods, starting with the antiquity, reaching to our very day. To give our students better education, instead of separating the old ways from the contemporary ones, we should mix traditional and modern values in teaching by getting the best sides of them.
There are a lot of views regarding education and its purposes. If our goal is only to produce good students who will study to pass the exams, learn what they have to learn without exploring all the other possibilities and cause no problems to us, then it won’t be a difficult issue to educate them. If, however, our goal is to produce well-rounded, cultured gentlemen and ladies who are open minded and capable of solving the problems they faced in the real life and to make the things they learned during their education at school meaningful, then the means of education will be much more complicated.
In this context, it seems really hard to decide which method/theory is better to apply. There are 2 different ways of thinking on the education; Traditional or Modern Methods? Both sides of the issue tend to fling mud on the other side. So, traditional and modern concepts can be seen as opposite because of misunderstanding and misconception, then which of the two assessing methods would be most efficient to give our students a better education?
Modern, progressive education sometimes causes our denying or ignoring the souls of the students. Our students study not to learn something new but to pass the exams. The brain, thus, works as a sort of computer that stores data only, but if we ignore the souls of children and so remove love from education, what do we get – modern, progressive, dumbing-down education in which the students have the fear of failure. Because of this pressure they may feel desperate and it’s a well-known-fact that when the students feel secure they become more successful.
On the other hand, traditional ways of teaching have a lot of handicaps. The teachers generally shoulders too much of responsibilities for teaching in the classroom to make sure everything they taught were understood by the students. There is a typical way and controllable class where the teacher will teach on the blackboard, explain, ask students to copy and make sure students pay attention and listen. In this kind of education, the teacher becomes the centre of classroom interactions, and the students can’t play an active role. Instead of being the dominating authority in the classroom, the teacher should facilitate the communicative process among the students. Any unnecessary intervention on the teacher’s part may prevent learners from becoming involved in the activities and thus hinder the development of their communicative skills.
If children shared only similar physical and emotional characteristics and expectations, it would be easy to motivate them and one method would be enough may be, but we are aware of the differences among our students and modern education has a goal to fulfill the individual needs, interests and capacities of the students.
In order to cultivate students’ innovation and learning effects, a variety of teaching methods should be applied to inspire and guide students involved in learning process. With the help of modern educational technology, the traditional lecture style and across-the-board teaching methods have been changed to individualized teaching methods and the closed classrooms are opening now.
In this context, Comenius project is a big opportunity for us to give our students a better education because the students will be able to communicate without the fear of failure. Peter Sacks’ “Sandbox Experiment” is a good example for this situation. He, as a teacher, thought that if he made the classroom similar to a playground, the students would become more willing to participate in the teaching-learning activities. Sacks stated “I’ll call class the “sandbox” and we will play all kinds of games and just have fun. He called this “The Sandbox Experiment”. He also had an approach that he called ‘Collaborative Approach’ where he didn’t act as he knew more than the students.
For the students who are learning English in a non-English-speaking country, there is a little chance for them to learn an acceptable form of English outside the classroom. In language teaching, it is important to provide opportunities for our students to engage in real-life communication in the target language, otherwise it won’t be meaningful for them to learn or speak English. The comenius project will give the teachers and students this chance, they will also have a really big “sandbox” to play in, learn something new, meet new people and share their ideas without the fear of getting low marks.
It is clear that modern education technology changed people’s traditional education idea. It changed the single teacher and student relationship in the past into relationship of teacher and student, student and teaching resources, student to student and the change of education elements became a positive contributing factor to the development of education itself. However, it mustn’t be forgotten that modernization process in education is a result of countless experiences. As human mind evolves, his perceptions, approaches and reactions evolve on many areas too. So it is very natural to notice many changes on teaching and learning methods, starting with the antiquity, reaching to our very day. To give our students better education, instead of separating the old ways from the contemporary ones, we should mix traditional and modern values in teaching by getting the best sides of them.
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