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Engage students in active learning experiences Set high, meaningful expectations Provide, receive, and use regular, timely, and specific feedback Become aware of values, beliefs, preconceptions; unlearn if necessary Recognize and stretch student styles and developmental levels Seek and present real-world applications Understand and value criteria and methods for student assessment Create opportunities for student-faculty interactions Create opportunities for student-student interactions Promote student involvement through engaged time and quality effort

Effective online discussion prompts provide a frame of reference through an associated shared experience or learning activity, but there are numerous creative ways in which this context can be brought to bear.

Universal intellectual standards are standards which must be applied to thinking whenever one is interested in checking the quality of reasoning about a problem, issue, or situation. To think critically entails having command of these standards. To help students learn them, teachers should pose questions which probe student thinking; questions which hold students accountable for their thinking; questions which, through consistent use by the teacher in the classroom, become internalized by students as questions they need to ask themselves. The ultimate goal, then, is for these questions to become infused in the thinking of students, forming part of their inner voice, which then guides them to better and better reasoning. While there are many universal standards, the following are some of the most essential:

CLARITY: Could you elaborate further on that point? Could you express that point in another way? Could you give me an illustration? Could you give me an example? Clarity is the gateway standard.

ACCURACY: Is that really true? How could we check that? How could we find out if that is true?  A statement can be clear but not accurate, as in "Most dogs are over 300 pounds in weight."

Profile of a Critical ThinkerHow do you know if your students are thinking critically? What is the profile of a critical thinker?  The following table provides an overview of the skills, strategies and thought-processes that distinguish critical thinking.

students in classrooms and in the broad campus environment will be more motivated and better able to participate in a heterogeneous and complex society

Cognitive growth is fostered when individuals encounter experiences and demands that they cannot completely understand or meet, and thus must work to comprehend and master the new

more frequently expressed democratic sentiment

In reality, what most teachers and students seem to lose sight of is the fact that ‘knowledge of the grammatical system of a language [grammatical competence] has to be complemented by understanding (sic) of culture-specific meanings [communicative or rather cultural competence]’ (Byram, Morgan et al., 1994: 4).

Culture in language learning is not an expendable fifth skill, tacked on, so to speak, to the teaching of speaking, listening, reading, and writing. It is always in the background, right from day one, ready to unsettle the good language learners when they expect it least, making evident the limitations of their hard-won communicative competence, challenging their ability to make sense of the world around them. (Kramsch, 1993: 1)

According to them, the teaching of culture has the following goals and is of and in itself a means of accomplishing them: To help students to develop an understanding of the fact that all people exhibit culturally-conditioned behaviours. To help students to develop an understanding that social variables such as age, sex, social class, and place of residence influence the ways in which people speak and behave. To help students to become more aware of conventional behaviour in common situations in the target culture. To help students to increase their awareness of the cultural connotations of words and phrases in the target language. To help students to develop the ability to evaluate and refine generalizations about the target culture, in terms of supporting evidence. To help students to develop the necessary skills to locate and organize information about the target culture. To stimulate students’ intellectual curiosity about the target culture, and to encourage empathy towards its people.

the communicative approach can leave students in suspense as to the outcome of a class exercise, which will vary according to their reactions and responses.

Students' motivation to learn comes from their desire to communicate in meaningful ways about meaningful topics.

Most likely they have an opinion of the topic, and a class discussion could follow, in the target language, about their experiences and viewpoints.

The Classroom Use Exemption does not apply outside the nonprofit, in-person, classroom teaching environment! It doesn't apply online - even to wholly course-related activities and course websites. It doesn't apply to interactions that are not in-person - even simultaneous distance learning interactions. It doesn't apply at for-profit educational institutions.

Definition

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problem solving activities should not be "neat" and pre-defined, but rather, complex with students required to discover relevant procedures

Peer-to-peer collaboration