I have read the article "Meeting Learners' Academic Needs'' by Reilly (2001). As we all know, we, teachers, do wish to meet our students' learning needs, to increase their motivation, and to decrease their misbehavior.

 

The most significant thing I learned from the article is that students come to school with different learning needs and those needs must be met accordingly. It is important that teachers create a positive classroom environment so that student can share their ideas freely and safely. Moreover, their ideas should be given a sympathetic ear to things they are sharing with the class. That will show them that their ideas matter in their learning community. Additionally, giving feedback must be done carefully.

Reading through this article, I can see that students’ needs are various but quite specific and reasonable. If a teacher knows how to and tries his/her best to meet those needs or as many of those as possible, he/she can motivate his/her students to learn more and get them engaged in class more resulting in their reduced mischievousness.  As a result, the most important thing that I learn from this article is that meeting learners’ needs as many as possible is the key to the success of a class, and that I didn’t pay much attention to determining and satisfying my students’ requirements but just focused on trying to cover all the items in the syllabus without considering if and how much they could perceive from the lesson. I have missed a lot of opportunities to understand, accompany and support my students in the right way.

 

In order to turn what seems quite negative happening in my class into the more positive, I will spend more time identifying my students’ specific needs, talking and listening to them for more understanding of their learning goals, helping them work out the learning process, encouraging them to get involved in class activities with active engagement, motivating and making them feel comfortable and confident to practice and perform in class. I will also frequently give my specific, realistic, appropriate and private feedback to my students for their correction and improvement. And of course, I will ask my students to comment my teaching activities so that I can timely adjust and appropriately adapt the teaching items to meet their requirement.

I found five tips of giving feedback necessary and I will try to apply in my real classroom: relate feedback to the goals, note-taking of serious mistakes of accuracy, show students that their learning really matters to us and that is a reason we give them feedback, we are not omniscient, and asking students to give us back feedback. In fact, all of these tips can be applied both face-to-face and virtually.