All Ireland Society for Higher Education
| Name: | Orla Lahart |
|---|---|
| Email: | olahart@ncirl.ie |
| Institution: | National College of Ireland |
Declan Kelly, dkelly@ncirl.ie
Brendan Tangney, tangney@tcd.ie
The environment in which Higher Education is operating has changed over the last number of years and continues to change. Diverse student populations as well as new conceptions of learning are causing Higher Education institutions to rethink their way of teaching. This paper will discuss one such philosophy of teaching, namely Suzuki's Talent Education. The foundation of this philosophy is grounded in the premise that talent is a product of environment rather than heredity. Dr. Shinichi Suzuki (1898-1998) believed that every child has talent, which can be developed if the proper environment exists. All children learn to speak their own language with relative ease and if the same natural learning process is applied in teaching other skills, these can be acquired as successfully. A student's natural learning process is nurtured via the use of a repertoire of teaching tactics. This repertoire of teaching tactics consists of Listening, Mastery Learning, Motivational Games, Positive Reinforcement, Tutoring Variations, Repetition and Review. This paper describes this repertoire of teaching tactics and illustrates through examples how they have been successfully applied within a Higher Education context. In particular it demonstrates how it has been used in effectively teaching Introductory programming on undergraduate Informatics courses at National College of Ireland