Teaching without words

There are thousands of different approaches in today’s pedagogy that allow teachers to give and students to get the knowledge. The majority of them are based on words. Although, we try to escape lecture-based classrooms, not many people can say they survive “wordless” classrooms. However there are technologies that allow teachers to do so.

Matthew Peterson,  a young scientist proposes his vision of wordless classrooom, that is really engaging and highly efficient at the same time. Another important thing to be mentioned is that this approach is aimed to different audiences such as dyslexic students, students with low language comprehension level and serves as a good tool for class differentiation.

The system, that is shown through the examples of mathematics can be further developed for the other subjects too. One can be sure, that both physics and chemistry can be taught through the same approach. However, my concern stays with language subjects. If the main aim of the project is to address the knowledge without words, then teaching languages must not be an exclusion. There are many ways of teaching the language without language itself. One of the examples can be addressing learners through the usage of different visual aids. I usually use them for providing the students with different ideas for their written and oral tasks.

I would be more than happy to use this tool in my classroom to teach language, however, the fact that I teach language and literature in High school, somehow prevents me from trying to implement the system. One of the main barriers towards teaching it, is system’s interface. One can easily see that the penguin looks quite “cartoonish”, which is no longer interesting for high school students. If system-developers can propose improved interfaces, I am pretty sure that the audience will be multiplied.

References

Peterson, M. (2011). Teaching without words. Retrieved October 11, 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLje8QRrwg