• Thinking Task Framework
• Jonina
• Teacher Education

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And the last point concerns a well known but very seldom implemented point. It has many times been highlighted that the focus of educational process should not be placed on getting learners acquire the factual information as on helping learners acquire components of the learning activity (from Russian, компоненты учебной деятельности). There are five main components mentioned in the literature:

1. set learning aim
2. define learning task
3. perform specific actions for doing the task
4. ensure self control
5. ensure self assessment of ones own performance

I will pay attention to the first component only – setting learning aims.

Observations of the lessons showed that expert teachers would make students think about learning aims (for the lesson in general and for each task in particular), while non expert teachers would not do it at all. I would like to highlight that ‘making learners set the aim’ is not the same as ‘teacher voicing the aim in the beginning of the lesson’. It means involving students in defining the aims, entering into the dialogue (the quality aspects of which have been discussed above).

To illustrate this third point, I would invite you to check the following video excerpt from a lesson of an expert teacher. This is a lesson of English as a foreign language in form 11. While watching the video you will notice that students are already used to defining learning aims so respond to the task very actively, which will obviously not be the case with the class that is only learning how to do it.