Ramakrishna

Help Them To Help Themselves!

The Following article contains practical tips for teachers who want to get their students more than talking in the classroom and with friends, they should be rather interacting. The article also talks  of how to accelerate learning abilities with special emphasis for developing analytical and synthesizing power.

Interaction involves both social and personal input, and the basis of the vast majority of everyday talking done by natives. Interaction involves the emotions; creativity; agreement;disagreement;people waiting patiently to get in a word;sighing; noding, gesticulating and so on. Interaction is not waiting to be asked a question. interaction is not giving a short, one sentence answer to this question. In some ways, what goes on in some of the worst cases are is a series of monologues from teachers, which will certainly kill the joy of learning.

Real interaction would, in some ways relegate the teacher to a background, who would rather assume a supportive role. The suggestion is that  a teacher should try to involve the spontaneous participation of the rest of the group.

And this does not happen a lot because the teacher is constantly contributing, egging on and prodding the students into participating. Many students do not, for some reason, feel free to comment on what another student has said. they, instead, look towards the teacher for guidance and, perhaps, permission to talk. this situation has to change if we wish to use the word “interaction” for what goes on in a typical conversation in the class.

How to Interact?

First of all, we as teachers cannot “teach” students to talk which they already do perhaps! However, for some reason students seem to “forgot” how to interact in the proper language of the subject. for this reason, we can propose that we “remind” them of the typical features of interaction. Interaction is once again, when the whole class is engaged in a group conversation. Interaction can involve the teacher but it must involve the students.

Interaction Happens when:

1. The students direct the dailogue at one another and not at or through the teacher.

2. The students comment immediately on what another student had just said.

3. The students disagree with or challenge another students statement.

4. The students don’t have to be invited(by the teacher) to speak.

5. The students speak when there is a short silence indicating the end of someone else’s turn.

6. The students interrupt one another, diplomatically to insert an opinion or question, etc.

7. The students use the personal pronouns “I” and “you”.

8. The use para linguistics such as exclamations, gestures, body language and so on.

9. The students are as relaxed as possible.

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