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Approaches to Teaching

Teachers are among the most powerful influences on learning.  Teachers at Jakarta Intercultural School are expert practitioners engaged in continuous learning.  The JIS Professional Teaching Standards outline contemporary teaching practices.

•  Focus on students’ cognitive engagement with the content

• Focus on developing a way of thinking and reasoning that emphasizes problem-solving

• Focus on imparting new knowledge and understanding and then monitor how students gain fluency and appreciation of this new knowledge

• Focus on providing feedback in an appropriate and timely manner to attain the learning goals

• Seek feedback about their effect on the progress and proficiency of all of their students

•  Have deep understanding about how we learn and promote a language of learning

•  Focus on seeing learning through the eyes of the student, appreciating their individual, non-linear progressions to the goals, supporting their deliberate practice, providing feedback about their errors and misdirection, and sharing a passion for the subject.

• Co-creating an environment where error is welcomed and a growth mindset flourishes.

Practice invokes a way of thinking about teaching where the teacher continually evaluates their effect on learning and intervenes in calculated and meaningful ways to alter the direction of learning. This mind frame sees teachers as directors of learning, partnering in the learning process with students [Prensky 2010].

INQUIRY

Inquiry is an approach to designing learning where the primary learning target is conceptual understanding.  The approach focuses on developing thinking and reflecting skills to help students be independent learners. Inquiry is a process where learners uncover current understanding, gain new knowledge and perspectives, make meaning from the knowledge gained, clarify and test new understandings, demonstrate understanding, and take action based on what was learned. Through inquiry students learn about themselves by demonstrating dispositions and skills.  

While there are many inquiry models the essence of each is very similar.  The use of a model to guide learning is an important step in the development of both teachers’ and learners’ understanding of inquiry.   It is intended as a framework to support thinking and conversation. It is not a one-size-fits-all recipe or a prescriptive sequence.  The elements in any model are components in an inquiry journey and generally happen in a cyclical or broadly sequential manner, but it is expected that implementation is less ‘ordered’ than it appears on paper. No two inquiry journeys are the same.

Design Principles for Teaching Learning Dispositions

As a teacher, you can build young people’s learning power by helping them to expand their own learning capacities.  This involves the ways in which you talk to students, organise your classroom, and design activities, as well as how you actually teach.  Each of the four main modes of the ways of teaching involves a range of behaviors that you can use to support and challenge learners. Underlying all these approaches is the conscious engagement of teachers and students with the detailed practice of learning to learn. As a learning focused school the language teachers use in the classroom continually reinforces the learning process and encourages students to see themselves as learners. We expect learning focused language in teachers pedagogical approaches. 

Updated August 2021