Инсайты с Insight, part 2.

I have 2 points to talk about today. No dilly-dallying, let's go!

First.The eclectic approach or eclecticism. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s all fine and dandy, but I guess you can make a guess as to what it is. Just to make sure though:

Eclectic approach is a method of language education that combines various approaches and methodologies to teach language depending on the aims of the lesson and the abilities of the learners.

One of the main points of any teaching, imho, is adjustment to the student’s needs. And doing that is virtually impossible if you decide to stick to only one approach. Therefore, a good teacher should have a lot of different methods and tricks up their sleeve to fine-tune their lessons to be exactly what the student/students might require.

Sticking to one approach is a no-no in my book.

Speaking of having various methods in our arsenal, here comes my second point - DOGME. A couple of years ago I didn’t even know what it was.

Dogme is an approach to teaching that argues that teaching should focus on the learner and not be driven by the resources available, including course books.

From the description, it seems like anybody can do that, there’s no need to study methodology in detail… And I’ve seen (when I was working in a corporate company as a methodologist and DoS and did lesson observations almost every day) plenty of teachers who thought of it as some kind of a “wing it” approach (most of them native teachers, khem-khem, but I do think the situation is much better now! People have learnt that being a native doesn't necessarily mean being a good teacher, thank God!).

But Dogme is anything but lazy teaching!

I spent some time at the conference talking to Heather Belgorotseva, and she pointed out that Scott Thornbury (the person who kind of invented it) is anything but unqualified and inexperienced.

To sum up on this point, to use DOGME a teacher needs to have a lot of methods in their arsenal and be ready to use them at any given moment to cover their students’ needs no matter what they are (language-speaking, of course).

To conclude, I am all in if we speak of the eclectic approach, but still a little bit on the fence about DOGME.

What do you think?

P.S. Thanks to my amazing colleagues for the photos! It was lovely seeing you again! ❤️❤️❤️

Никто же ничего не заметил, да, да? 😅

Let's go!