Tuesday 21 July 2015

Socratic Question - 3- Dr.Sunil Sagar

Socratic Question-3

How to design sessions for Proficiency in English course for Engineering?

Dr. Sunil Sagar
Head
Department of Communication Skills, MEFGI, Rajkot 

1 comment:

  1. There may not be and should not be a permanent answer to this or any Socratic/pedagogic question. However, there can be temporal solutions that should be updated time and again.Having said this, here's a few temporal solution rather approaches I found useful while designing and implementing PE sessions:

    1) Begin with the end in mind:
    It applies to the micro and macro level i.e. what is the expected end result of the entire course and that of a session.

    2) Avoid being the center of the class:
    The PE course is meant to be students centric. Hence, design the course has to be such that the concept clarification, theory part of the session has to be covered within 10-15% of the session and the rest of the time should be utilized for students' activities/interactions followed by feedback 10-15%. (Thus, 20-30% facilitators portion and 80-70% for the students activities).

    3) A number of activities in a number of possible ways:
    Now, we are to make the students use more than 70% of the session's time, they need to be offered various activities and in various ways. A set of activities can be shortlisted for a particular session. (A pool of tried and successfully tested activities in the class can be shared among the facilitators.)

    4) Session related examples:
    Usually, with years of experience, a language teacher would have a fairly good collection of examples/anecdotes that s/he uses in the class. However, to use an appropriate example for an appropriate situation needs a great deal of judicious and deductive selection.
    The examples/anecdotes can be shortlisted anticipating the possible requirement of the session. e.g. "To explain this, let me tell you a story of 'Mr. Sure'. He had three sons, 'ensure', 'assure' and 'insure' respectively..."

    Hope this would help.

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