PETA Week 3: Teaching Methods

This session I learned about four teaching methods that simply applied at school. They are: Direct Instruction, Lecture Discussion, Guide Discovery, and Group Interaction.

Direct Instruction can’t going well without teacher presence. In this method, teachers directly give instruction to students as we call it teacher centered learning. It doesn’t help much students to think creatively and study actively. Because we only depend on the teacher. But don’t say this is bad. We can use it but not over time. Only for a momment as the students very difficult to understand about the stuff we can use it.

Lecture Discussion is the teachers give some question to students in order to check their understanding on previous material. It’s quite more sharpen students’critical thinking, but not too much. Because, this method mostly used to connect the previous stuff to the new one.

Compared to the method before, Guide Discovery is better method to sharpen students’ critical thinking. Teachers give questions step by step to guide the students to their own understanding. At first teacher doesn’t explain at all about the material, only give questions. In this method, students actively thinking what they’re going to learn, connect one question to others, and conclude it by theirself. So, as a teacher we should be smart in deciding the questions.

The last one is Group Discussion. This method asks the students to be more active than the methods before. Students form a group and they discussed the material among their friends in that group. Here, teachers only a fasilitator. Teacher should give an appropiate time to the students as they’re discussing. It’s based on the difficulty of the material. Because if teacher give a long time for an easy discussion and vice versa, the teaching and learning process can’t be effective.

By knowing this method, hope we can use it appropiately based on the situation in our classroom next.