Barbara Kochan - Educational and Didactic Convictions and Findings

Educational and Didactic Convictions and Findings

Kochan’s work is characterized by a continuous interplay between theory, product development (language book, software), and practice. It always includes the concrete work with children, also in environments beyond school such as in the "Computer-based Learning Workshop". By studying children’s social and language behaviour and learning during self-determined projects outside school Kochan gains insight and access to children’s comparatively natural learning strategies which hardly come to light in teacher- or book-centred lessons. But Kochan opens up just these "natural" learning strategies in order to improve learning, also at school.

The conviction that even very young children are able to learn self-determinedly and for themselves runs through Kochan's entire work (from role-playing for oral language use up to software for the acquisition of written language). She regards children’s need to share in the communication of their environment as the main motive for this learning, and she recognizes children’s natural search for the rules of spoken and of written language as well as of its communicative usage as the main strategy of children’s learning. Therefore she makes both, sharing in communication and searching for rules, the centre of didactic attention. From this she draws the conclusion that a main didactic task for teachers is to design classes as social culture for speaking, listening, writing, and reading, a culture which functions as learning environment for language development. This environment should offer good models of communication, invite to communicate, give children an opportunity to talk meta-cognitively about their language problems and their findings, and appreciate children's activities and findings (even the preliminary, yet incomplete findings). According to this Kochan regards and treats children as authors, from that moment on when a child thinks to record a wording by using graphic signs, even if the child not yet uses the conventional characters. The discovery and the gradual use of the conventional characters, also - bit by bit - the correct spelling is regarded as a process of development of a communicative action which is complex right from the start. This development is driven by the child’s - teachingly provocable - experience that he or she by means of letters can tear his or her own thoughts out of the head.

In the concept of "developing learning" and "developing teaching" the emotional, social and cognitive powers of the child’s personality are regarded as agents of learning in "I-want-to"-situations. The concept uses the child’s need for interaction and communication in the groups he or she belongs to. It is based on confidence in the child’s willingness to try hard to attain own goals. Developing language learning results from self-defined language use by means of analysis and reflection of this use as well as by means of communication about these activities. The pleasure the child gets from his own findings is the reward as well as the drive of such learning. Kochan’s conceptual programme gives teachers a mental orientation for shaping their lessons. But it offers neither recipes nor copy patterns. The teacher, too (not only the child) is regarded as a personally responsible and independently thinking individual, who has to give time and attention to the children’s individual personalities, their abilities, and their needs in order to help them to develop their potentials.