Luo Jiaxi, Class 14, Senior 1, Shenzhen Xin’an Middle School Instructed by Yang Siyu, Tang Ying

深圳市新安中学（集团） 高一（14) 班 罗嘉熙

指导老师：杨司宇 汤颖

On October 10, our teacher Tang Ying gave us a very useful lesson on passive learning and active learning. At the beginning of the class, Tang showed us a picture of a man that was fat and had a big belly. We were all concerned about the man’s belly because it covered two-thirds of the picture. The student who could say the most sentences about the picture would win. We all enjoyed ourselves and practiced speaking English a lot at the same time.

Tang listed the kinds of learning. They include reading, discussion, demonstrations, teaching others, lecturing, practice, and audiovisual activities. Then, we discussed ordering them from least effective to most effective. Most of us thought lecturing was the most effective method, but actually, research shows that this is the least effective!

The most effective is teaching others because of the differing results between passive and active learning. Lecturing, reading, audiovisual activities and demonstrations are passive learning while discussion, practice and teaching others are active learning. In fact, knowledge is constructed ourselves instead of being taught by teachers, so teaching others is a good way to remember and improve our integrated abilities. As a result, we ought to teach others more!

After this class, I realized the importance of active learning. From my point of view, excellent students are supposed to arouse their enthusiasm to actively learn by themselves rather than only learning passively from teachers in class.