Saturday, August 18, 2012

Active Learning

Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment

It's fun. . . 


“I want my students to become critical thinkers.”  This statement was expressed by one of my colleagues one morning in our first year of teaching as we talked about lesson plans.  As first year teachers, it was hard for us to understand how to implement a process that would create the result we wanted from our students. 

"Active Learning" in the textbook "This We Believe" is defined as "Students and teachers are engaged in active, purposeful learning".  To me, this meant that our students needed "hands-on" learning, guided by the teacher in order to become the critical thinkers we believed they could be.  

As a project manager of a financial institution for 27 years in the IT area, I knew that the experience our students needed to become these critical thinkers was to be in a collaborative position of responsibility.

My colleague and I discussed about how to do this and the idea of having monthly school projects that the students would work on in groups would be the best way to give our students that experience. 

Although we created the high level guidelines to follow and goals that were expected to be achieved at each point of the project, it was the students who were given the responsibility to decided what form the project would take and how to create a plan for its implementation.

My colleague and I were amazed at how excited our students were when they found out that they would actual be in charge in of how the project would be developed and implemented.  We were more amazed when we saw during these monthly projects our students grow into the "critical thinkers" we wanted them to be.  Certain students who were once shy and quiet became more outspoken and able to advocate not only for themselves but their team as well and how other students who did not know how to be a team player became a central resource as part of a team.

As educators, we supported our students through the process, but never took away their ability to be "in charge" of their own learning. We implemented lesson plans that showed our students how to run a "Brainstorming" session, what teamwork was about, how to create a project plan and how to monitor the project and assign task responsibilities for the project as a Project Team.  We made ourselves available as "consultants" for their projects, especially when they hit a snag in a certain area of the project, but only if they requested the assistance.

Of course, there were some issues that arose the first time we implemented this type of work product and of course, the students also had to change some of their own ways of thinking in order to complete the projects, but overall, my colleague and I found that we had created independent, critical thinkers who could work in groups and find solutions to their own needs as an end result.  They became self-advocates for not only themselves, but their peers as well, they became more confident in themselves and their work, they became successful at implementing their own ideas and designs and they ended up developing intrinsic motivational processes instead of extrinsic ones.




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