52 Cultivating Learner-centeredness in a Time of Rupture: Lessons from the Shift to Virtual Pediatric Academic Half Day during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Primary Subject area Medical Education Background The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly disrupted the postgraduate learning environment. In light of public health recommendations and the need to offer safe learning environments, many programs have drawn upon virtual technologies to continue delivery of formal academic curricula. Despite widespread use, however, little is currently known as to how trainees view these changes. Objectives The authors sought to explore resident perceptions on the COVID-19-influenced shift from in-person to virtual academic half day (AHD) delivery. Design/Methods A cross-sectional survey was created and distributed to 51 pediatric residents who participated in virtual AHD at a university-affiliated Canadian program distributed across three sites, from March to June 2020. Survey responses were obtained confidentially through a secure, online platform (REDCap). Descriptive statistics and inductive thematic analysis were used to analyze responses to close-ended questions and narrative comments, respectively. Results Response rate was 60.8%. Residents reported statistically significant improvement in their attitudes towards virtual AHD across all metrics collected. Areas most strongly rated included increased trainee engagement and overall satisfaction with virtual delivery, in part due to increased relevance of content. Factors enabling participation included educationally safe interactions and a more comfortable and flexible learning environment. Conclusion These results suggest that the transition to virtual AHD was generally well received. During an uncertain time, when trainee vulnerability is heightened, the need to explicitly attend to educational issues of relevance, engagement, safety, and comfort are crucial. Further, given the rapid and reactive pivots to new curricular strategies in the wake of COVID-19, it is incumbent upon programs to incorporate resident feedback to ensure a learner-centred environment is maintained.

Exploring Senior High School EFL Teachers’ Beliefs Regarding Learner Autonomy

Since Indonesian education paradigm shifted from teaching to learning, the development of learner autonomy is more emphasized on the learner-centeredness. Henceforth, it is important to conduct a study of teachers’ beliefs regarding learner autonomy as it is widely known that teachers are recognized as an active agent to inculcate autonomy among learners. This study aims to explore EFL teachers’ beliefs regarding the idea of learner autonomy and its development within senior high school settings. This study was a mixed method study that employed a questionnaire and interview as instruments to obtain the data. The participants of this study were 18 senior high school EFL teachers. The result of the study shows that teachers hold very positive beliefs toward learner autonomy. Most of the teachers believe their learners are less autonomous in learning. Learners tend to be passive and less independent of teacher. Teachers assert that they are already promoting learner autonomy within their teaching. Some efforts have been done by EFL teachers to promote autonomy among learners such as giving freedom for learners to express themselves in learning, giving learners opportunities to solve their problems as well as motivating the learners to learn English. The constraints that teachers encounter basically derived from two factors: intrinsically from the learners’ low motivation to learn and extrinsically from the school facilities that are less adequate to support the development of learner autonomy.

Combining American, European, and World Andragogy Together

Savicevic provided a critical consideration of fairly scientific andragogical concepts in 10 European countries, five each eastern and western. Knowles provided the most articulate American conception of andragogy with six assumptions and eight process elements, tested and refined with 12 entities. Knowles was criticized by Welton for neglecting democratic social action and Hartree failing his promise. Knowles' andragogy was supported from Long seeing its vibrant strength, Griffith on practice, Tough on warmth, Maehl on advocacy of learners, Isenberg on connecting internet learning, and Houle on learner-centeredness. Lindeman was the first to bring andragogy to the USA. Kessels and Peoll brought together such things as andragogy, self-directed learning (SDL), learning organization, and learning in the workplace. Merriam et al. suggested andragogy be replaced with ‘transformative learning' as the new andragogy. Henschke and Boucouvalas updated and published Malcolm's autobiographical journey. This chapter explores all of this.

Students’ use and perceptions of feedback in a paired collaborative speaking task

Learner-centeredness is an integral part of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and paired conversations are promoted by this method because it is considered to effectively increase the student talking time. In paired conversations, instead of being merely interlocutors during their speaking activities, students are expected to initiatively assist each other’s performances by exchanging feedback and comments. This study examined 28 intermediate students on how they gave their partners feedback during a paired collaborative speaking task. It also investigated their perceptions on exchanging feedback. Observation and semi-structured interviews were employed for data collection. A mismatch between their viewpoints and actual performances was found. The interview analysis suggests that the students were well-aware of the roles and benefits of giving and receiving feedback. Meanwhile, the empirical data collected from the observation scheme shows that only a modest number of feedback instances, particularly corrective feedback, were actually given by the students. This was mostly resulted from the students’ lack of proper strategies and skills on giving feedback and their fear of losing their partners’ faces.

How to Teach Grammar to Adult ESP Learners at Technical University More Communicatively: Task-Based Approach

<p class="Abstract">The article is devoted to comparison of the effectiveness of grammar acquisition by adult learners in two types of instruction – based on the traditional PPP (Presentation, Practice, Production) approach and TBL (Task-Based Learning) approach – in ESP university classes. We conducted a qualitative research in which we tried to incorporate grammar instruction in communicative language teaching and for that purpose selected two groups of students (the PPP group and the TBL group). They were taught five topics, each with a focus on particular grammar items. The comparison of the results we obtained showed that students’ achievement in the TBL group increased more substantially than in the PPP group. Also, the majority of students in the TBL group liked learning grammar at the point of need, which we consider particularly important, since it stimulated their motivation and contributed to the acquisition of grammatical structures. When considering the positive aspects of our experience of using TBL and task-based grammar learning in particular, we should first of all point out its learner-centeredness which provides a number of advantages in teaching adult students: the focus on real communication, addressing the students’ needs by putting them into authentic communicative situations, encouragement of students’ responsibility for their own learning, exposure of students to a wide variety of language, including grammar, ability to motivate students.</p>