Learning by Doing

I was impressed with the issue “learning by doing” this week, in which there are several important disciplines, including :

Ü Learning is active.

Ü Teacher is facilitator.

Ü Teaching and learning are sharing experiences.

Ü Do small group activities.

Ü Students should be responsible for themselves.

Ü Ask students to do some reflection.

Most of us used to be taught in class without the practical team activities, so sometimes we do not really understand why things would be like the ways we learned. Therefore, knowledge in the book is hard to be relative to our life experiences since we seldom face the situation. However, if we can learn by doing some actual activities, I believe we would get more than the target knowledge itself.

Take our mid-term project as an instance. When we were asked to do something to promote English Department, we had to collect plenty of information about the topic, take many pictures, find out new function of PPT for making an interesting and attractive project, etc. By doing so, we were impressed with every small step of this group working. We did not only learn various techniques of utilizing computer programs, but also the background of English department and the skills of negotiating with my partner and coordinating a report. Hence, it is obvious that learning by doing could be the most ideal way for studying.

On the other hand, on the website we were taught to use concordancer to look up word use. It can be supposed to be another great Internet self-learning system that learners could quickly get the point of the word use by reading those organized sentences. I think it is really helpful in our learning.