(Kurita)Hello, everyone. Welcome to WEEK 1 of “Interactive Teaching” entitled “Let’s learn about Active Learning”. This is the topic for this week. As today is our first session, I would like to begin with an explanation of the structure of “Interactive Teaching” using this figure. As I introduced to you in the Grand Opening, this program consists of three sessions: Knowledge, Skill, and Story. Each session lasts for eight weeks, and I’d like to show you how the topics for eight weeks are structured and how they correspond to the Knowledge Session. Please look at this figure. It shows a student and an educator climbing a rock. This is a metaphor for a class. The educator is helping the student up from a slightly higher position using the class. Here’s an enlargement of the figure. Fifteen classes are given in one semester, and we call them “a course”. A course contains what you want your students to learn; you will set the course’s goals and objectives. You will provide learning contents, and then evaluate to see if the students have really learned. In other words, a course consists of these three components: goals/objectives, contents, and evaluation. The time required for one class is 90 minutes, and each class has the same structure as a course: goals/objectives, contents, and evaluation. Through these classes, the educator will pull up students and help them climb the rock. Using this metaphor, I would like to explain the topics of “Interactive Teaching”. As you can see, there are six flags standing here. Each flag corresponds to a topic. First, this one relates to the topic of how to design a course. We are going to take up this issue in the corresponding session on the syllabus. Second, this flag corresponds to the topic of how to design a class that enables students to learn. We intend to probe this issue in the corresponding session on class design. Third, this flag relates to the topic of how to think of and how to conduct specific methods in each class. We shall take up these issues in the corresponding session on Active Learning. The fourth one is about evaluation, which has to do with both classes and course. How much have students learned? How can we evaluate their learning and give relevant feedback to the students? We shall take up these issues in the session on evaluation. These are the topics related to a course and its classes. What about the learners? How do students receive these lectures? The fifth flag refers to the session on learning sciences. We shall take up the process of how students understand, how they are motivated, and so on. There’s one more flag here. The sixth flag stands beside the educator. This is, so to speak, how an educator can go up on the rock by himself/herself. So, we also have a topic related to the career path of educators. Next, I would like to talk about the Skill Session. This figure is an enlargement of the scene of a class. The skills needed for conducting a class include how to speak, as I am doing right now, how to act, and how to involve students. We shall take up such skills and techniques every week, with the cooperation of the actors of Ongakuza Musical. Next, let us proceed to the Story Session. There are many educators in this figure. They are the educators in various fields at various stages, and they are climbing at a much higher position than this person. We will invite them to deliver a talk about how to climb up a rock; in other words, how they view educators, how they have been involved in teaching, how they have elaborated on classes, and how they view education. That’s all for the structure of “Interactive Teaching” consisting of three components, namely, Knowledge, Skill, and Story, as well as the relationship among the topics. Now let’s go on to WEEK 1. We are going to take up a method called Active Learning. The knowledge session is entitled “Let’s learn about Active Learning”. It consists of five topics, as you can see here. Today the session starts with “What is Active Learning?” The next one is “Active Learning today". For this topic, we will invite Mr. Hideo Narita from Kawai-Juku and learn together. The next topics are “Choosing a method from Active Learning” and “Applying the methods of Active Learning”. These compose the session “Let’s learn about Active Learning”. The last topic called “Work” focuses on self-introduction. As we are going to learn “Interactive Teaching” with graduate students, we would like to think about the function of self-introduction through their self-introduction. The next part is the Skill Session. The session for this week is entitled “The Philosophy of Skills: The Crucial Point is Invisible”. The guest speaker is Mr. Masanori Fujita from Ongakuza Musical. This is followed by the Story Session, for which we have two guest speakers. The first is Dr. Shuichi Hiraoka, who specializes in organic and supramolecular chemistry. I would like to ask him about the Active Learning applied in science courses. The second speaker is Dr. Haruo Takagi, who specializes in organizational behavior. Dr. Nakahara will ask him about learning at business schools using case method. This is the structure of WEEK 1. Now let’s learn together.
