Approaches to teaching and learning

1.2. The importance of some approaches to teaching and learning
Grounded in contemporary educational research, the IB’s six approaches to teaching and five approaches to learning guide and focus educators and students in IB World Schools. They play a crucial role in ensuring that the aspirations of an IB education become a reality in the classroom.
The approaches are centred on a cycle of inquiry, action and reflection—an interplay of asking, doing and thinking—that informs the daily activities of teachers and learners. They also place a great deal of emphasis on relationships. This reflects the IB’s belief that educational outcomes are profoundly shaped by the relationships between teachers and students, and celebrates the many ways that people work together to construct meaning and make sense of the world.
The same six approaches underpin teaching in all IB programmes. The approaches are deliberately broad, designed to give teachers the flexibility to choose specific strategies to employ that best reflect their own particular contexts and the needs of their students. In all IB programmes, teaching is:
• Based on inquiry. A strong emphasis is placed on students finding their own information and constructing their own understandings.
• Focused on conceptual understanding. Concepts are explored in order to both deepen disciplinary understanding and to help students make connections and transfer learning to new contexts.
• Developed in local and global contexts. Teaching uses real-life contexts and examples, and students are encouraged to process new information by connecting it to their own experiences and to the world around them.
• Focused on effective teamwork and collaboration. This includes promoting teamwork and collaboration between students, but also refers to the collaborative relationship between teachers and students.
• Designed to remove barriers to learning. Teaching is inclusive and values diversity. It affirms students’ identities, and aims to create learning opportunities that enable every student to develop and pursue appropriate personal goals.
• Informed by assessment. Assessment plays a crucial role in supporting, as well as measuring, learning. This approach also recognizes the crucial role of providing students with effective feedback.
Our focus on approaches to learning is grounded in the belief that learning how to learn is fundamental to a student’s education. The five categories of interrelated skills aim to empower IB students of all ages to become self-regulated learners who know how to ask good questions, set effective goals, pursue their aspirations and have the determination to achieve them. These skills also help to support students’ sense of agency, encouraging them to see their learning as an active and dynamic process.
The same five categories of skills span all IB programmes, with the skills then emphasized in developmentally appropriate ways within each programme. The five categories are:
• Thinking Skills, including areas such as critical thinking, creative thinking and ethical thinking
• Research Skills, including skills such as comparing, contrasting, validating and prioritizing information
• Communication Skills, including skills such as written and oral communication, effective listening, and formulating arguments
• Social Skills, including areas such as forming and maintaining positive relationships, listening skills, and conflict resolution
• Self-management Skills, including both organisational skills, such as managing time and tasks, and affective skills, such as managing state of mind and motivation.
The development of these skills plays a crucial role in supporting the IB’s mission to develop active, compassionate and lifelong learners. Although these skills areas are presented as distinct categories, there are close links and areas of overlap between them, and these categories should be seen as interrelated.
Learning a new language may be challenging. For some people it seems natural, however for many it’s more of a struggle, and rather a long and difficult process. Luckily, there is no single method of teaching English that is always right. 
How to choose the right method of teaching English?
Over the years different science, theories, and learning styles were developed in terms of teaching foreign languages. You won’t find the best, the one and only method of teaching English to kids or adults. Choosing the proper teaching style depends on students’ skills and abilities. So in this article, we listed some fresh ideas on how to learn a new language and how to choose the right method of teaching English. 
Always remember to tailor the teaching method to your students’ interests and needs. Also, with the right motivation to learn English, the students are more likely to succeed. So in order to choose the right method of teaching English to adults or children, start with understanding why a person needs or wants to learn the language and then focus on the best technique to achieve their goal. New methods of teaching English include the same well-known approaches and a few rather unconventional ones, that are especially beneficial to kids.
Choosing an easier methodology in teaching English to kids has some merit. Firstly, young children’s attention is hard to maintain. The usual lessons where students have to sit at their desks and listen to the teacher is not a perfect fit for them. Did you know that a child’s maximum attention span is about two to three times their age? So, a five-year-old child would have an attention span of around fifteen minutes. 
Secondly, preschoolers memorize information differently than adults. They have a great mental trait called involuntary memory, which activates involuntarily when they’re occupied by games and creative activities.
Thirdly, perception mechanisms are also different for kids. Being emotional and eye-minded is their forte. They are attracted to things that interest them the most, such as bright colors, unusual shapes, secrets and mysteries.
Based on these factors, teachers try to use suitable methods and techniques when teaching English to children. Thanks to this, they can cater to their unique psychological and physiological needs.
Language has been and will remain the key to the world of knowledge. Language proficiency with multiple languages has been valued since ancient times. At each stage of the development of society, a certain language played an important role for all mankind. Knowledge of foreign languages opens up new doors for a person to improve himself and expand his/her worldview. If earlier knowledge of the Russian language was demanded, today the English language plays a prominent role. The modern age requires a new approach, new methods of teaching foreign languages. Awakening a child's desire to learn, master new knowledge and activities in the meantime, build a further direction of their own education is the main goal of the current school.
The students are given the task of independently studying, finding, analyzing materials, while the main task of the teacher is the right direction. The teacher needs to logically competently construct a lesson so that students are interested in learning English, since the practice of the traditional method, forcing students to cram words; grammar in practice did not give the desired result. The search for new teaching methods is associated with a lack of motivation among students to learn English. Very often, there is no positive motivation, since when learning a foreign language, students encounter some difficulties and do not absorb the material due to their psychological characteristics.
Experiences show that the use of various, modern, fresh sources and means provokes students' interest, increases their motivation to study. Teaching methods are the process of interaction between the teacher and students, as a result of which there is a transfer and assimilation of knowledge, skills and abilities provided by the content of training [1, p. 85]. It should be noted that the teaching method is a complex, systemic formation, which is characterized by all the characteristics that underlie the classification.
The combination of different forms of work and methods helps to creatively organize the lesson, arousing the interest of students in the subject. One of the important tasks and goals of modern techniques is teaching communication and mastering speech means. Moreover, each technique has distinctive features, due to the combination of different approaches, methods, and techniques in teaching EFL. Each of the methods has certain characteristics, some of them are more popular and in demand, and some less. In addition, new methods of teaching a foreign language are regularly developed, so now every teacher of the university can choose the most suitable method of work for himself. When teaching a foreign language in academic lyceums, task-based, project-based methods are most often used for communicative purposes.
The goal of these approaches and methods is to master a living, spoken language and to learn the ability to communicate. When using the communicative methods in teaching, students are more active. The task of the teacher in this case is the ability to involve everyone in the audience in the conversation. The essence of this method is to create real communication situations. When recreating the dialogue, the student has the opportunity to put into practice all the knowledge gained. An important advantage of the method is that it has a variety of tasks: role-plays, discussions, debates, etc. According to Willis (1996), there are six types of tasks:
Listing tasks: For example, students might have to make up a list of things they would pack if they were going on a beach vacation.
Sorting and ordering: Students work in pairs and make up a list of the most important characteristics of an ideal vacation.
Comparing: Students compare ads for two different supermarkets.
Problem-solving: Students read a letter to an advice columnist and suggest a solution to the writer’s problems.
Sharing personal experience: Students discuss their reactions to an ethical or moral dilemma.
Creative tasks: Students prepare plans for redecorating a house. The teacher sets up the tasks and the students' performance is the goal. The teacher must step back and observe, sometimes acting as a facilitator or a monitor.
A classroom during a communicative task, students do most of the speaking actively, and frequently the scene of a classroom while leaving their seats to complete a task. Because of the increased responsibility to participate, students may find they gain confidence in using the target language in general. Teachers in communicative classrooms will find themselves talking less and listening more becoming active facilitators of their students' learning.