Abstract:

The article analyses a burning issue in education – how learning works, especially in the 21st century. The problem statement of the research rests on the assumption that scholarly inquiry into the paradigm of knowledge acquisition relevant for a new type of learner should be intensified in order to expand the awareness of mental and emotional processes inherent in teaching and learning. Thus, the article analyses the concept of social contract – negotiating rules of interaction and distribution of rights and responsibilities among teachers and learners. A successful agreement largely determines the emotional disposition towards teaching and learning. Though modern didactics declares a learner to be the fulcrum of educational processes, still teachers and educators in general play a vital role in determining how learning occurs; accordingly, the study introduces the concept of ‘Expert BlindSpot’ and analyses how important it is to determine students’ learning needs and prior background knowledge and experience in order to efficiently facilitate teaching and learning. To do so, the research scrutinized seven pillars – seven learning principles which should be considered by educators in order to ensure that learning occurs. The qualitative study (interview) held offered teachers and learners’ perspectives on educational processes and how the seven principles operate in the classroom context. Interviews were conducted with six students and six teachers selected purposefully. The interviews were recorded and transcribed. Key words were selected from their interviews.

Some results obtained from students’ interviews included:
a) challenges: lack of clear statements of requirements, encouraging attitude, teacher friendliness, teacher’s interest in students’ background knowledge and needs, rapport between teacher and students; generation gap; b) ways to tackle these challenges: consulting with teachers, asking for clarification, informing the teacher of student’s needs and trying to defend their viewpoints. On the other hand, some results obtained from teachers’ interviews included: a) challenges: memorizing / identifying students in a large group (during the pandemic), finding out students’ theoretical background, teaching them according to ZPD, creating a friendly atmosphere, various knowledge levels, establishing rapport when the cameras were off, and anxiety connected with meeting students’ expectations;
b) ways to deal with the challenges: offering task choice, using humour, organizing quick revision, asking to paraphrase the instruction, stressing students’ achievements, comparing students’ self-assessment results with teacher’s assessment, providing regular feedback, doing flexible planning, being friendly, reducing test anxiety by providing only familiar task types, increasing the number of practically-directed activities, etc.

The conclusion made from the research is that students and teachers mostly have similar problems, they do their best to solve them; however, students’ repertoire of methods to tackle the communication problems seems to be insufficient. Consequently, teachers need to grant the students more opportunities to discover methods of solving their learning problems.

Keywords:

'Expert BlindSpot’, Learning Principles, Knowledge Gap, Component Skills, Social Contract in Education.