Education's Best-Hidden and Most Valuable Resource

[janet leary]

The Challenge
There are some principles that drive learning. Every human being is
driven to search for meaning. We all try to create patterns from our
environment, and we all learn to some extent through interaction with
others. Because ours is a social brain, it's important to build
authentic relationships in the classroom and beyond. Complex learning
is enhanced by challenge and inhibited by threat. We want to deeply
engage learners with their purposes, values and interests. Thinking
and feeling are connected because our patterning is emotional. That
means that we need to help learners create a felt meaning, a sense of
relationship with a subject, in addition to an intellectual
understanding. Once educators and parents grasp that complexity, they
begin to function differently in their lives and in their classrooms.
Furthermore, the wider the scope and range of possibilities in style
and pace of both instruction and assessment, the greater the
possibility that different kinds of students will be engaged by
learning. This has obvious benefits both for the individuals who
enhance their competence (who might not otherwise have done so), and
for society, which requires as much diversity of ability and approach
as possible in order to thrive in a time of unpredictable change.
Students themselves can be excellent sources for devising innovative
approaches to learning. They may in fact be education's best-hidden
and most valuable resource. A classroom of students who are encouraged
and wisely guided in thinking about what they want to learn, how they
want to learn it, and how their learning should be assessed has a far
greater capacity for creative imagination than any single teacher.
Thus engaging students in understanding their own interest and
creating their own learning is a good beginning for their
participation in a society facing rapid unpredictable change.
Memory and Learning
I view teaching as analogous to cooking; excellent gourmet chefs
describe the preparation of their favourite dishes with "a little bit
of this and a little bit if that." This approach is recommended for
teaching youth development - one that is not set and rigid, but a
flexible mixture of learning and teaching formats. " A little bit of
this and a little bit of that" refers to employing a variety of
teaching techniques to promote active learning (i.e., student
involvement through discussions, reading, and writing) by engaging the
student through a conglomerate of activities from debates to visuals
to role play to panel discussions. The literature describes this
philosophy as an active learning approach.
The research literature supports active teaching formats over passive
ones. Significant features of active learning in the classroom occur
when students are involved in more than listening, less emphasis is
placed on giving information and more on developing students skills,
students are involved in higher-order thinking (analytically,
critically, and relationally), and students explore their own
attitudes and values.
These active learning aspects require that students process
information by doing and saying, not only through listening and
reading - the trademarks of traditional teaching. Research in the area
of memory and understanding indicate that persons on average retain
long-term: 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what
they see, 50% of what they see and hear, 70% of what they say, and 90%
of what they do and say (Magnesen, 1983). Doing and saying are
recurrent themes of active learning which many educational researchers
agree is best obtained by using a wide variety of teaching techniques
to stimulate the senses with "a little bit of this and a little bit of
that."
Passive observation is not enough; it is interactivity that is so
essential. "Tell me, and I forget. Show me, and I remember. Let me do,
and I understand," says the ancient Chinese proverb.
To contact David Slade please go to
slad...@hotmail.com
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