Q 1. Tobin tells us an anecdote of a classroom situation which any teacher can face. Students’ lack of interest and non-response can be the most frightening thing to every instructor (or at least to me). In this summer training, we’ve discussed how writing is a process and how interactive it can be, which Tobin describes using a metaphor of a party host. However, unlike conferences held in a one-to-one conversation, classroom situation requires one teacher to interact with multiple students, and it can easily lead the teacher to be a performer or a parent. How can a teacher/a host encourage students/guests to speak up when no one wants to speak?
Q 2. Arola contents that Web 2.0 separates form from content because it doesn’t require users to create their own design but to fill in certain templates. While I agree that current web pages do not ask writers to care about the form of the webpage, I don’t think it necessarily leads to writers less concerned about the form of their writing. A word processor does not make writers less care about their word choice than a typewriter just because it can allow writers to edit much more efficiently. What do you think about her assumption that the user-friendly technology will make them less aware of what they are doing?
Answer to Q 1:
ReplyDeleteTobin's discussion of the difficulties behind encouraging students to speak up when in class made me think about some ideas that I would try incorporating into my teaching method when my students will inevitably punish me with awkward silences. One idea I tentatively came up with was having "the blabber bag" or some other attempt at a clever name. Once discussion starts to go through a lull or students just are not speaking, I will begin shaking a little bag filled with the names of each student. This gives them time to speak up and avoid the heart attack of having names pulled at random. Once a name is pulled, they would be safe from being forcibly called on until all names have been pulled (which hopefully would never happen). I used to employ this technique as a means of delegating what tasks to give employees when I was a Starbucks shift manager and it was great because someone would either volunteer before a name was picked or if a name was picked they could not be mad because it was completely at random. I am not so sure if an approach such as this would ultimately prove useful in the classroom, however, I have found that people are more positively responsive to an "authority" figure when they utilize some out of the box methods in the classroom.