Week 7 - Autonomy

"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." ~Thomas Carruthers

This is the one quote that came to my mind as I was reading about Learner Autonomy and How It Can Be Fostered.
I strongly believe we teachers/educators should highlight our roles as facilitators in the classroom these days. Having so many resources, tools around to help students become more independent, it is crucial that we do our best to help learners select what can serve them the best.

A number of ideas I have were highlighted in the main text suggested for us to read this week. From these I would call attention for:

a) autonomous learning is by no means "teacherless learning";
b) it is not easy for teachers to change their role from "providers" of information to counsellors and managerss of learning resources

Motivation plays a very important role in this discussion of making learners more autonomous and, again, it is our job to try to show students the motivation they may have and are not aware of to be successful as language learners.

Last, but certainly not least, we had the chance to create a lesson plan based on the concept of one-computer classroom. I find it extremely important as this is the reality most of us live so far. We may dream of the days when we might have a computer for each student in the class. However, I think a lot can be done even when resources are scarce and that was shown in the great lesson plans I could see produced by my peers doing this course. As they say "Where there is a will, there is a way."