Taken from http://www.minimalstudent.com/the-recipe-for-student-success-ingredient-four-acurious-mind/
Capturing Students’ Minds By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Sunday, May 1, 2016 Post 263
As a college learner I had a very inquisitive mind, and even when I decided to go for a master’s degree in education, I realized my mind has not changed at all in terms of its inquisitiveness. But if I try to re-construct how my college or my postgraduate professors used to construct their lessons to capture my attention, I must confess that somehow many of them failed. That is, they were not able to raise any interest towards a topic they were teaching on “automatic pilot,” not really worrying if students were or not engaged in learning. As a faculty member I avoid teaching on “automatic pilot,” especially after teaching the same course several times. To raise student interest I try to always find new things that learners can try to improve the content of the course and the kind of deep learning tasks they have to perform instead of having to take exams that simply turns them to be regurgitating what the information you tell them in class or what they find in their books. After taking a course with Prof. Michael Krauss from Lewis & Clark University, it is imperative that learners get something challenging and rewarding to
develop themselves as deep learners. Teaching in automatic pilot does not help the learning process. The act of teaching must always imply student learning, and somehow the needed engagement to attain to achieving course objectives. Mindfully speaking, one of the models for learning that I got hooked with a couple of years ago is Kolb’s Learning Model because I like to have students move around their learning as feelers, thinkers, doers, and watchers. In hindsight, and as a mindfulness exercise, as a learner I moved around this model, and it provided me with deep learning, critical and hierarchical thinking. I expect to see the very same results in my students, but I must be certain to design and develop tasks with new technology to help pupils attain deep learning. Based on this, for the sake of my teaching and my students’ learning, I give students the chance to think and feel what they need to learn. And by means of watching and doing they can realize that newly acquired knowledge can become skills, and those skills can turn into competences they can use at work. Helping them become mindful of their own learning process by having them work on Web 2.0-enhanced lessons, they can reflect on how useful it is what they are learning for their future or current careers.