Dialogue and Flexibility

When designing the instructive strategy for the TED Talk workshop, time limit was the primary problem for me. There were a lot of pints I would like to address, and it would not take me too long to address them. But if taking discussion, dialogue and debriefing into consideration, everything would be in a rush.

 In China, real discussion or dialogue is hardly seen in class. Even if we have a discussion, it won’t last more than five minutes. Students are reluctant to talk and share, since the teacher will eventually provide the right answer. Therefore, when design this workshop, I felt quite insecure to plan a relatively long time for discussion and sharing. I was afraid that no one wanted to say anything and I had to fill the awkwardness. So I decided to plan 5 minutes at most for each discussion, and fill the rest of the workshop with lecture, video and hand-on practice.

The First time when I led the workshop, I was surprised by the dialogue we had. The two girl were much more talkative than I expected. When we talk about the application of CER model, they had an “A-Ha” moment and brought their own writing experience into the discussion. Our conversation lasted much longer than I planned, so that we didn’t have enough time for another learning task. But I think it is OK. The point is not teaching, not covering all the agenda I planned, but learning. The learning tasks are designed to facilitate learning. As long as learning is transferred and the goal is reached, it is fine to change the instructional strategy according to the situation.

Another example was the fourth workshop I led, where I met with two students who were very interested in how technology had changed our way of thinking. In my original design, we were supposed to use critical thinking skills to talk about the Google’s driverless car for 5 minutes. However, they got very highly engaged when one of them led the topic to Facebook. Instead of gearing the topic back, I chose to follow their interest and incorporate critical thinking skills into the discussion of that they were passionate about. It was a not a novel topic and they had already got a lot of ideas about it. But when using critical thinking to reconsider the assumptions, evidence and argument they had before, they were brought to a new way to understand the subject.  I could tell that they were very excited about the innovative ideas resulted from critical thinking. The learning result could be much more impressive when students are highly engaged. By giving up the content I planned and following what students wanted to learn more about, we had a wonderful conversation, during which learning took place naturally.

There is also a learning happened to me in these two experiences, which is that students are smart enough to figure things out with time and a little guidance, and they are very excited about the knowledge they discovered. Dialogue is a way to show the confidence in students’ ability and provide a safe platform for them to construct knowledge. I am sharing my experience of self-directed learning and dialogue education with my professors in China, and hope that they can find a way to introduce these way of learning to more Chinese students.