Creativity emerged from the needs of innovating teaching methods

Ms. Quynh Giao was explaining the lesson

We had a chance to attend a lively and interesting English period taught by MS. Quynh Giao. Instead of taking place in the traditional way with chalks and blackboard, a period of Ms. Giao occurred extraordinarily and interestingly. The teacher and the students exchanged the ideas about the lesson via the only tool - the foam board covered with white decal, sticked to an alluminum frame with two upper and lower axes which help the transparent plastic plate between rotate. The necessary content of the lesson was written on the plate beforehand. Before coming to a new lesson, in order to help the students review the previous one, Ms. Giao used soft orange pieces  with a written English word, among which one was empty and then she asked some of her students to guess the absent word. A lot of hands were raised high synchronously. Some guessed wrong and some guessed right but all felt enthusiastic and attentive to their teacher’s explanations. Forty five minutes passed quickly. Le Dang Khanh Phuc (a 6-grade student of Tran Hung Dao Secondary School) cheerfully said: “Studying in such a way, I have a feeling of acquiring lessons so easily and interestingly. Games, tests, pictures and images all help us to memorize Englih words longer.”

With a great dedication and love for her career and for 20 years of teaching, Ms. Quynh Giao has always been preoccupied in researching new teaching methods and instruments to help students to receive the English knowledge effectively, flexibly, and actively. Her concerns have received the upport from her husband (being also an English teacher) and her colleagues. Ms. Giao said that her teaching instrument were very simple, highly economical and that the important thing was to invest thinkings on creating the content of lessons. Besides, it was necessary to prepare pictures, images for visual and vivid illustration of teachers’ imparted knowledge. During the teaching process, with her husband’s assistance and thanks to her clever hands and creative mind, assumingly useless waste, calendar covers, and foam boards have become scientific teaching tools.

This solution has made a diversity of approaches in a foreign language’ teaching and learning, promoting teachers’ creativity in using instruments to create various activities like making, matching or filling in sentences, which helps to get rid of the boredom in study among students and at the same time attract strongly and stimulate students’ ability to focus their attention as well as their interests in discovering. And what’s more important is the solution has an applicability on a large scale because it is simple, easy, user-friendly, less costly and everybody can use it.

Mr. Nguyen Van Hoang- Headmaster of Tran Hung Dao Secondary School revealed that the school has made a statistics test on this new teaching approach which showed that 100% of the students felt interested in study, more than 84% comprehended 80-100% of the lessons, 1.8% undertood under 50% of the lessons (comparing with 10.2% who undertood under 50% of the lessons when old methods were used).

(Translated by THKC)