The
Holistic approach I’m developing, which is based on my professional experience
and observance, on my studies and research as well as on my intuition, seeks to
find a way to enhance the best and most useful aspects and strategies of all the current pedagogical approaches and theories that offer a horizontal way to approach the learner. It is in this way, a sintergetical approach.
I believe in seeing persons as wholes. A student is a person and every aspect of that person -mental, physical, emotional, spiritual -is present in the classroom and must be taken into account in the interactions teacher -students / students-knowledge.
I believe a class should cater for all needs. I believe the teacher's role is to unleash all students' potential skills. I believe in transmitting known ways of learning while respecting each individual student's personal way of learning.
I believe in offering opportunities for all students to explore the knowledge while obtaining various tools and strategies that suit their own ways. A class should be an adventure. An adventure where all students find their interest while receiving the chance to raise curiosity, develop creativity, and feel at ease to take risks.
I believe in NLP, Multiple Intelligences, Emotional Intelligence, Brain Gym, Meditation, among others as strategies available to succeed in such adventure.
It is my opinion that a plan of the lesson should be as flexible as students there are in a classroom. Not chaotic, but flexible. This flexibility should maintain a mainstream marked by the contents the students need to acquire according to the aim of the course, while allowing for variations selected out of the students' needs and interests.
I believe evaluation and assessment should be made in formal as well as in informal ways. More often and relevant, in the evaluation of acquisition of a language as a means of communication should, of course, be the latter. Evaluation and assessment should not only guide the teacher's work but also, and most importantly raise the student's self-esteem, provide them with a useful feedback which in itself encourages and allows the student to set new goals.
All students have a right to know where they're standing. All students have a right to receive opportunities to discover, become aware of, and unleash all their potentiality.
Last but not least, all students and teachers have a right to learn in harmony, without unnecessary external pressures, living the teaching-learning process from their heart, from their right as well as left brain hemisphere, making the best out of one of the richest interactions in human relationships.
Michèle Schäfer
