The Question Mark Method

By Anita Kovacevic

Teaching anything is never an easy process. Keeping things simple is possibly the best way to go about it. After all, if you can't explain something simply, then you don't know it well yourself.
This booklet is my simple method of approaching teaching, learning, planning and assessing. This is the method which made my most complicated tasks doable, helped my quietest learners talk, my non-writing learners write, and my overwhelmed teacher trainees focus and grow.
The method is applicable to any area of education, and examples are provided from my work experience. There are planning examples, as well as learning games.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781794712577

Book preview

The Question Mark Method

The Question Mark Method

Anita Kovacevic

First edition

Copyright © 2019 Anita Kovacevic

All rights reserved.

ISBN : 978-1-79471-257-7

Paperback ISBN 978-1-79470-812-9

This work is licensed under Standard Copyright Licence

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Any similarity to a person or place described in this book is purely coincidental.

Published by Anita Kovacevic

http://anitakovacevic.wixsite.com/anitas-haven

Edits and cover by Anita's Haven

Proofreading by Dunja Crnko & Tena Jurisic

Distributed by http://www.lulu.com

Dedication

To my husband

– who knows what teaching means to me.

To my children

– may you love who you are and love what you do.

Foreword

If you still need a book to teach, then you are still a learner, not a teacher.

This is what I said to a group of trainee teachers at the beginning of a workshop. Mind you, plenty of faces sulked at my words, because they'd spent several days before that complaining about not having course books before the lessons began. Truth be told, it was a trick statement. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I do firmly stand by my words, which I proved to the trainees in our subsequent sessions, and I hope to prove to you as well. True, we do need course books to make yearly plans and as guidelines, basis, but we should never depend on them. A teacher who is unable to prepare a lesson without a course book still has a lot to learn.

Learn. Not study.

And therein lies the trick of my initial statement, which none of them got at the beginning.

If you still need a book to teach, then you are still a learner...

There is a wonderful difference in English between the words student and learner, which is sadly lost in many other languages. I'd love to be a learner, not a student. A student studies from books and for exams, whereas a learner learns for life. All things considered, it's not at all a bad thing to still be a learner, even as a teacher, right? In fact, you do not make a very good teacher if you stop learning once you've achieved your teaching certificate.