TAD Preschool’s dedication to perfection directs children, parents and teachers towards evaluating their own skills and discovering their individual potentials. Within the TAD Preschool education philosophy, we are aiming to train a new generation of children who are aware of their own abilities and strengths and who are able to use their strengths in a positive way, who can survive in the modern world and who can use a number of languages in different settings to communicate. Within the TAD Preschool education system, our children acquire and develop skills such as;
- Evaluating the things that they see, understanding its importance and establishing a cause and effect relationship,
- Acquiring the cognitive, social, emotional and academic skills that are integrated in classes,
- Acquiring and individualizing information through various pedagogical approaches and methods,
- Cooperating with peers and teachers in order to understand that learning is a social and intellectual activity,
- Using computer technologies and digital communication tools in a beneficial way,
- Communicating fluently in foreign languages,
- Developing leadership skills,
- Exploring and developing artistic skills,
- Internalizing learning processes and being able to use them in a beneficial way in a world that is becoming more and more difficult to live in.
Real learning does not occur through the direct transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the child but occurs through participation, experiencing and discovery. Within TAD Preschool, our children are directed towards acquiring and internalizing and hence towards discovering and further developing their capacities rather than memorizing in order to succeed in the 21st century environment.
WHY WE DON’T ADVISE TWO-TEACHER SYSTEMS
Within the continuously increasing competitive environment, new English Teaching Methods used for advertisement purposes are introduced. Following these advertisement-based trends, many preschools have started to implement the two-teacher teaching systems in which one teacher uses English and the other teacher uses the native language of the learners. Following international standards, TAD Preschool believes that a foreign language cannot be learned at a spoken or communicative level in an environment where the native language is used for communicational purposes instead of the target or foreign language and thus is against the usage of the native language in teaching a foreign language. In educational settings where one teacher provides the English instruction and the other provides the same instruction in Turkish, the learners will inevitably wait for the Turkish version since it’s naturally easier for them. A student who is constantly exposed to the native language at home or outside of the home will inevitably ignore the English version and wait for the instruction in Turkish.
Because the two-teacher systems are based on the teachers using both the native language and the target language simultaneously, they are derivatives of the Grammar Translation Method whose roots can be found in the Roman Empire and which was especially implemented into teaching systems in the 19th century. This method is also referred to as the Classical Method because it was initially used to read and understand ancient Greek and Latin literature texts. Aiming to teach the structural elements of a language, the Grammar Translation Method was abandoned because it failed to improve the basic and vital skill of speaking and alternative methods aiming to improve skills including the communicative skills were developed to replace it (Harmer, 2007, 67-68).
In the Grammar Translation Method, the teacher is always in control and thus is a teacher centered approach where the teacher is required to provide information, explain, exemplify, translate and thus constantly talk. Each moment the teacher talks represents a moment where the student is denied the opportunity to talk or use the language.
For all these reasons stated above, TAD Preschool does not advise a foreign language teaching model where the native language is constantly in use and does not use these models in its teaching approach.