6th Post: Questions about the organization of my classes

Typical deductive method textbook

I have been a victim of strict learning standards objective-based language learning courses (what is this sentence?!). Formal education is strictly related to learning standards, goals to achieve by every student, almost to the same extent (we are all different! how come can this be demanded?). Objectives are needed and somehow, standards as well, but they have to be flexible and, needless to say, they are not. I had not heard of Bloom's taxonomy before, but now I know that I have been taught most of all subjects in my life according to this taxonomy. I do believe there is a certain need to integrate basic content to understand further notions and structures, but not all content requires following a specific progressive order (I made the same point in the last post).

In my native language classes a deductive method was preferred and used. The inductive was used too, but as an alternative, when some concepts were not clear, or needed another point of view to be understood. I agree with my colleagues that both methods are useful and need to be integrated in the curricula and the method or theories been used in class. They somehow complement each other and give different points of view of the same topic. If research usually tries to cover both of those methodologies, why shouldn't language teaching do not so?

Warm-up activities were and still are daily occurrences, although they are sometimes just used in the beginning of the courses, not as a daily routine... Most of the textbooks and activities were mechanical (never ending workbook grammar exercises...) and controlled exercises, which I have found to stroke creativity most of the times, as well as blocking autonomous learning. I remember a really good English language seminar at Pompeu Fabra, in which communicative tasks were encouraging and helped me to integrate and broaden my English interlanguage.

I remember having started to work through project-based learning tasks (case studies, Problem-Based Learning) at university, but not really focused on language learning. These tasks were mostly designed to do in groups of three or four people and the more we have worked in groups, the more we feel like the pictures above every time a teacher asks us to do so...  

progressive enragement on "working in groups"

It is not that we are against cooperative working, but the types of tasks we have to do as a team. Mostly we do not choose if we wish to do so or not; not even in university... If we could choose a group from the beginning instead of changing groups every second, we would probably learn much more than now. We do not even get used to our colleagues and their working PLE. A good team work is a balanced combination of information based on one's PLE and shared with the rest of the group. However, no such thing really happens (not in the classroom at least...). There are groups, but we all work individually and paste all the parts together... I do not think we can call this team work...This is at its worse when we have to translate text in groups, for example.