Maker 02 Teacher's Guide Unit 4

process of finding, assessing and using information to teach themselves how to do whatever they want to do and make whatever they want to make. Students and the Scientific Method In order to develop critical thinking skills, students need to realize that merely thinking that something is true is not enough. Sharing their opinions is essential, but these opinions should be based on facts duly checked and analyzed. The scientific method encourages students to engage in reasoning tasks through active learning. Schneider and Blikstein (2015) state that students who discover scientific concepts by themselves create deeper and more meaningful knowledge structures, which are then easier to transfer to new contexts. Therefore, students should learn how to pose the right questions, collect and analyze data in order to draw conclusions and connect the diverse ideas that they have access to. Hypothesizing is the key to becoming a solution provider, and in this series, students will be given the chance to come up with a range of hypotheses and check their validity by themselves. As Brown (2004) states, “the objectives of a curriculum are not limited to linguistic factors alone, but also include developing the art of critical thinking”. In this series, students are constantly encouraged to consider their own relationship to a topic and how they personally fit into the given context. The development of some of the characteristics of critical thinkers identified by Ennis (2003) underlies the development of #MAKERS , which gives students the tools to formulate plausible hypotheses, ask clarifying questions, judge the credibility of their sources, develop and defend reasonable opinions and question their assumptions—just to name a few skills. #MAKERS has been developed based on sound and contemporary theories about education and language acquisition. It is based on knowledge concerning how foreign languages are learned, the role of teachers, 21st-century skills and effective pedagogical models. The sessions in the series clearly display how these theories have influenced the selection of sources and topics, the way they have been explored for both language and cognitive development, the nature of the tasks, the depth of the questions and the suggestions included in the Teachers’ Guide. Following the principles of teaching and learning presented by Vygotsky (2012), #MAKERS does not ask students to do activities and perform tasks that only require of them what they can already easily do, since that would impair learners’ motivation and involvement. Understanding that learning is a social process, the series focuses on activities and tasks that aim at developing what Vygotsky called “zone of proximal development”, building on students’ previous knowledge to provide them with the tools they need to do things that they were not able to do previously. Moreover, the series is also based on Piaget’s constructivist theory. By putting students in situations in which they still do not have all the knowledge necessary to solve a certain issue or answer a certain question, #MAKERS makes them feel curious and stimulated as they are faced with a challenge or a knowledge gap relevant to their context, motivating them to solve it. The inductive approach is one of the key elements in the series and it establishes how students are encouraged to create hypotheses and analyze data in the realms of language too. In this process, students are challenged to start with an observation of how a given linguistic phenomenon occurs in order to search for patterns and then develop explanations for those patterns through a series of hypotheses. By posing key questions to raise awareness of how the English language behaves in real use, #MAKERS guides learners to notice features and patterns that can help them discover the rules in a more autonomous way, which also places them as protagonists in their own learning processes. Language is therefore contextualized, and examples are extracted from English in use, whether in spoken or written texts. These contexts always revolve around themes, situations and topics that are familiar and relevant to students, and the language used becomes gradually more challenging throughout the series. The topics act as a springboard for the exploration of language that is actually used by this age group, including spontaneous expressions (slang words) and phonological phenomena. However, the contexts are not limited to exposing students to language; they also encourage the development of social-emotional skills and critical thinking by boosting learners’ curiosity and reactions. Since the topics of the units—especially the texts they present—are meaningful and relevant, they serve as natural triggers for spontaneous communication. The series focuses on a communicative approach towards language learning and suggests contexts where language comes through as students feel the need to communicate real meaning, hence conveying a message is more important than mechanically practicing isolated items and structures. The situation, the roles of the speakers, the setting and the register play a major role in the process, and practice activities are presented in settings with clear communicative purposes. In every unit, learners have opportunities to interact and naturally use the language as the four macro skills—speaking, listening, reading and writing—are practiced. The contexts proposed and the amount of interaction promoted will naturally prompt students to become more aware of the diversity in their own groups, as well as to learn from each other in an environment of total collaboration, mutual respect and fairness. Diversity in education represents a broad range of ideas to create safe learning environments. Teachers and students recognize, foster and develop sensitivity and empathy to the needs of various people as they learn from each other and become more prepared to celebrate differences. In the #MAKERS series, we also rely on principles of task-based learning to encourage students to totally focus on a task that is fun, meaningful and contextualized, using the language as a means instead of practicing isolated items. Lessons revolve around the completion of a task for which the language to be used is not pre-determined. Learners then resort to the language and communicative strategies they think are most appropriate to accomplish that task, negotiating meaning and producing something new as their linguistic resources arise.