Cheng Hongbing: No challenge, no learning and appreciation

Challenge thinking is valuable; Only learning with challenges can add value and have fun.

We know that most teachers like students who learn well, and they are always envious of others who teach well. They want to teach some good students themselves, so that they can easily bring out good results. Although the teaching of good students has many advantages and many conveniences, in fact, the teaching of good students will also increase the difficulty of teachers. It is not so simple how to make excellent students learn something, improve their thinking, and make excellent students more excellent. Teachers should make sure that each lesson has a moderate challenge to students, so that the classroom value can be increased, and students can learn value.

I listened to an English class in Grade One of Shanghai Jinrui School, and the class was very successful. In the classroom, the students' English conversation is very smooth. The students have mastered a lot of vocabulary and can use it freely. The teaching objectives have been basically achieved, and the classroom effect is very good. What causes this? I think it must be related to the students first. The students in this class have very good English foundation and strong English conversation ability, which is the prerequisite. Secondly, it is related to teachers. Teacher Lu, who teaches this class, has done a good job in several aspects: the goals of classroom behavior are very clear, and what students do is very clear; Implement teaching in various ways to make students interested; In particular, teachers are good at creating language environment, allowing students to use language in context, and cultivating students' real language literacy.

Although I reached the above conclusions, I was not satisfied. I further thought about whether the class was too smooth, and the slippery class prompted me to ask more why. After deep thinking, I found that the questions set by the teacher in this class are basically parallel, that is, although the teacher gave many questions, they are all on the same level. In class, the teacher led the students to solve these problems one by one. Because the difficulty was the same, after the students successfully solved the first problem, it can be basically asserted that the latter problem was not a problem for these relatively excellent students, and the remaining classroom time was the "performance" time of students under the guidance of the teacher, Or is it meaningful to show the time when students successfully answer questions? If it is meaningful, where is its significance?

Just like watching a football match, we can predict the result of the game early. The time after that is not garbage time for fans, but at least not enjoyable. One of the important charm of the game is the unpredictable final result. Suspense is a charm. Although we can't simply equate teaching with ball games, even from the perspective of classroom teaching itself, does this class have problems and insufficient challenges for students? I do not easily deny the value of this class. I just put forward whether we can explore more valuable classroom improvements on the premise of fully affirming that this is a good class. I think there will be no more meaningful value added for excellent students' classroom learning without a certain degree of challenge.

As far as the teaching practice of this class is concerned, I think there are many ways to increase the difficulty of thinking. First, teachers can let students draw inferences about other colors, such as color. Students learned green and yellow in this class, and teachers can draw inferences about other colors. The second is to use words in the context. This class is all about the use of one word. Teachers can properly let students use two or three words in sentences and paragraphs, which increases the difficulty of learning and challenges students. Third, we can change or add a condition to increase the difficulty of thinking and stimulate students' thirst for knowledge. Fourth, students can find out the shortcomings of their drawings through figure comparison, and guide students to think about new figures to solve problems. Fifthly, we can consciously provoke contradictions in seemingly smooth places, stimulate students' thinking through questioning, and improve the challenge of learning.

In order to make the classroom challenging and add value to students' learning, teachers can also further expand and constantly ask themselves: First, is our classroom teaching unidirectional or multi-dimensional? The so-called one-way degree is that teachers blindly "preach" knowledge to students. For example, teachers now like to use PPT teaching, which is often a one-way output behavior of teachers, and students have no chance to try and make mistakes; The so-called multidirectional means that students should output more, and give students more opportunities to output, express their opinions and try. Second, is our teaching design translation or upgrading? Teachers often use a model of instructional design to translate out several learning designs, the same way, the same type, but no upgrade, no upgrade. Third, is the question limited or unlimited? In the current classroom, teachers' questions are often restrictive, and the answers often point to a standardized answer, which is easy to limit students' thinking. Therefore, certain non restrictive questions are also needed in classroom questions.

Challenge thinking is valuable; Only learning with challenges can add value and have fun.

The author is a super teacher and the principal of Shanghai Jinrui School

Source | China Teachers Daily

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