September 22 post

I found Chapter 4 of the textbook very interesting thinking about mismatches between a teacher and a student was not really something I had ever considered, at least not in depth. I liked a lot of the real world examples given, such as the one on page 78 when it says that a researcher found that “learners reported to have learned several items that were different from what the teacher had planned for them” as she conducted her study. This makes complete sense because there is absolutely no way a teacher can assume what a student is thinking, the same way any other person can’t read minds. This immediately had me wondering what we can do to help minimize these mismatches, and Kuma addressed this. Of all of the ten sources that were identified as possible sources, I particularly liked number 4, pedagogic mismatch. While all of the ten made perfect sense, this is something that I feel could cause the most problems simply by my experiences as being a student and learning to be a teacher. Some things, such as the objective of a lesson, seem so obvious to a teacher that it is so easy to forget that your students may have absolutely no idea why they are learning whatever they are learning on that given day. I personally feel like this would be very common, just as it would be common for a native speaker to forget something that seems so obvious to them in language. Just as language is natural to the native speaker, the lesson objectives are natural to the teacher—not the student.

As for the articles, I liked the idea of a “pedagogy of particularity.” I think I have heard this term before but I never quite knew what it meant so I was glad to have seen the definition written out formally. I agree that any postmethod pedagogy needs to be this way, and I find it hard to believe anyone could contest that, and I feel the same way about a pedagogy of possibility. I also liked that the article discussed the post-method learner, because I think often times when we think of pedagogy we think of the teachers job and the teachers issues, but a student can have a pedagogy too.

The article by Pennycook was also interesting and I liked her three themes. However, it was odd to read this article after the article by Kuma because Kuma went into such depth with pedagogy, but in this article it was only one section. Regardless, I liked the section on “a pedagogy of engagement” because I have always thought that engagement was the key to student motivation and therefore success. It is so interesting that in this article there are more types of pedagogical approaches. I feel like there is a pedagogy for everything, and I think it is almost a bit confusing. What confuses me even more is that I like all of the types of pedagogies I am reading about, but I don’t think I could possibly weave them all into my classroom!