Pedagogical Pursuits
Maximize Students' Grow and Individual Success through Differentiated Instruction
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tanya de Hoyos
This study helps teachers provide multiple access points to diverse learners to maximize growth and individual success. However, developing and promoting differentiated instruction doesn’t happen overnight. It, rather, requires a series of essential strategies for working in heterogeneous classrooms and eliminating tracking. The author will also share some useful websites to implement a variety of processes to meet the learning attributes and characteristics of diverse students’ population in the classroom. Participants get innovative approaches that can be adapted to any educational level. The author will bring the interest and curiosity into the room by designing and categorizing information and examples from the slides.
Doctrine and Experience: Using Aristotle, Clausewitz, and Callwell to Teach Counterinsurgency
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Frederick Dotolo, Carolyn Vacca
This pedagogical paper explores how I use Aristotle’s Nicomedian Ethics as the foundation for an upper level undergraduate seminar on military ethics and strategy in counterinsurgency warfare. The class links Aristotlean ethics to the historical conduct of Small Wars as developed in Clausewitz and C.E Callwell. In addition, students study and evaluate the contrast between this humanities-centered approach and that of the social sciences of modern counterinsurgency doctrine.
Task-based Language Teaching Approaches to Teaching of Intensive Reading in China
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tan Shanyan
Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) puts students at the center. It requires training in language knowledge and utterance skills. At the same time, it lays stress on the cultivation of language using. TBLT approach has prominent status in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching. It is challenging the current college English teaching reality in China, which is still language-centered, teacher-centered, and text-centered. This paper explores the theoretical background and the application of task-based language teaching approaches in EFL. It tries to appraise the feasibility of TBLT approaches in teaching college intensive reading. It reflects on the change of teaching goals from language structural goals to language functional goals in EFL teaching. Its emphasis converts from teaching methods to learning methods. It embodies the shift from what to learn to how to learn. It mainly focuses on communicative function and social use and teacher-centered to learner-centered. The communicative task itself is central to this approach. A task-based syllabus is a kind of process syllabuses. The organizing principle involved is not the presentation and practice of the language to be learned, but rather all kinds of tasks and activities which apply a target language to communicate. This research looks at using TBLT approaches in an intensive reading class, with expectations to complete cognitive tasks, linguistic tasks, cultural tasks, and affective tasks - and cultivate learners’ communicative competence.
