Characteristics of CTL Contextual Teaching and Learning CTL 1. Understanding of Contextual Teaching and Learning

Thus, a teacher has to make the lesson meaningful and relevant to the students; gives the students a chance to find and apply their own ideas in learning process and makes them apply their learning strategy to build their knowledge. 14 b. Inquiry Inquiry is defined as a process where students actively develop their skills that enables them to locate, gather, analyze, critique and apply information in a wide range of contexts, as they develop understanding of the knowledge they are seeking. Through the process of inquiry, students will be able to construct their understanding of the learning content naturally. Inquiry implies involvement that leads to understanding; involvement in learning implies possesing skills and attitudes that allows students to seek resolutions to questions and issues while constructing new knowledge. There are several processes in inquiry, they are: 15 formulating problem, hypotizing, gathering data, testing the hypothesis and concluding. c. Questioning Knowledge which obtained by students always begins with questions, thus questioning has a big role in the learning process. By questioning, teachers can motivate, guide and assess students‟ thinking ability. Questioning is considered as a reflection of curiousity, while answering question shows thinking capability. In learning process teacher does not just transfer the knowledge, but rather to stimulates students to find it by their own way. In every step and learning process, questioning always be invloved, so that it is very important for teachers to set up the teaching- learning process by arising students‟ curiousity through questioning. ________________________ 14 Trianto, op.cit., p. 109. 15 Wina Sanjaya, op.cit., p. 119. d. Learning Community The concept of learning community is suggested that the learning outcome is obtained from cooperation with others. 16 In CTL class, teacher makes students into some groups which consist of high achievement and low achievement students. In this case, the students who have a higher achievement will help the lower one. All members in the groups share their ideas and experiences, work together to solve problems and be responsible of their own group and opinion. If this concept of learning community is carried out well in the classroom, it can be very useful for the learning process. e. Modeling Modeling is a learning process which visualizes something as a sample that can be immitated by students. In CTL, modeling is not only done by the teacher, the students also can be involved to demonstrate something based on their own experiences. Modeling can be useful in learning process, because students learn more easily through observation and imitation than by trying to understand only from verbal explanation and instruction. 17 f. Reflection Reflection is a respond to events, activities or knowledge that the students just learned. 18 A meaningful knowledge is obtained from a process. Teacher helps students to make a connection between their prior knowledge and their new knowledge. ________________________ 16 Trianto, op.cit, p. 111. 17 Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion Keith Morrison, A guide to Teaching Practice, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 186. 18 Trianto, op. cit., p.113. By doing so, students feel that they get something useful for them from what they have learned. In learning process using CTL, teacher always give a chance to the students to recall what they have learned. The teacher let the students to conclude the learning experience in g. Authentic Assessment Authentic assessment relies on the students performance in demonstrating their skill or ability connecting to the context of a real-life situation. 19 Teacher has to know students‟ learning development and make sure that they followed the learning process well. In order to know it, teacher can ass ess from students‟ portfolio or from students‟ performance. Authentic assessment does not focus on how much the students get information, but it rather to know to what extent they understand the learning material, so that the teacher knows the difficulty that is faced by students and knows how to overcome the problem.

C. Teaching of Simple Past Tense Using CTL

Based on the characteristics and the principles of CTL which was already explained in the previous pages, there are several things that are conducted in the classroom to prove that CTL is applied. First, teacher motivates and encourages students to involve in learning process actively. Teacher also needs to pay attention and use the students‟ idea and experience to conduct the learning process. Second, teacher presents the learning material and let the students to analyze it by themselves, in order to challenge the students with their own ideas and conceptions to interpret it. The teacher then allows them to show their own ideas and motivates them to apply their own ideas and experiences to the learning process. Third, teacher makes a learning community or small group of students to improve their cooperation among students. Here, the students discuss the material with their friends in the groups and present it in front of the class. ________________________ 19 Richards I. Arends, Learning to Teach, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007, p. 235.