Reflection # 4
Inspiration in Class
Without any doubt, inspiration is one of the greatest tools available in education for both students and teachers. Many times teachers use this tool very successfully to motivate students to move on to more difficult tasks. In return, sometimes students can even inspire teachers to go beyond their normal duties to assist them. This helps us to inspire other people to think and to recognize new ideas.
Inspiration motivates students to use a variety of pictures and graphics to interconnect ideas. Words, pictures, maps and cartoons can be used to brainstorm ideas that will help to explain many activities such as an accident, a crime, or even sport events. Such brainstorming is important in every discipline at every level in the educational system.
When a series of information has to be presented in a classroom, it is important that this information be properly organized and prioritized in order to help the students to understand the relationships and the patterns. This helps them to understand this subject matter quickly and also aid them to remember the information for a very long time as in the grouping or classification of things such as plants, animals, colors, letters, sounds and even affiliations.
In order to improve retention and comprehension of subject matter, appropriate diagrams can be used to interconnect ideas visually. These diagrams can also help to avoid misconceptions because they usually bring the ideas closer to reality.
As teacher we need to implement some of these ideas in the classroom by presenting more teaching aids such as games, tables, graphs, pictures, models and movies. Occasionally, it is inspirational to bring people from out of the school environment to give short lessons or demonstrations to the class room.