I watched the two simple
video clips with great interest because it made me travel back down memory lane and reminisce the 4 wonderful years I had, teaching in a primary school some years back. After all, the 2 case studies featured were captured from experiences shared by primary school teachers. At times, I had to admit that the intangible returns gained from teaching young children far outweighed those from educating teenagers in secondary schools. Generally, being more impressionable, young children are more receptive and appreciative towards changes or effort made by their teachers to ‘impress’ them. Secondary school students might find simple filler activities ‘childish’ and ‘a waste of time’ but primary school ones might even look forward to receiving more of such, hence the first battle in trying to get the learners’ interest, had already been won with them. However, it was not a case of lost battle in capturing and TRYING to sustain the secondary school students’ interest. From the two videos, I felt that these were the several pointers that we could bear in mind while trying to create an effective and engaging learning environment.
1) Learners should be made to feel important by assigning specific or special tasks to each of them so that they would feel a sense of responsibility and importance. When they feel that we trust them enough to let them handle certain tasks, their sense of self-importance and value would be boosted and hardly would they disappoint the teachers by doing a sloppy job. In the videos, the exemplary teachers assigned different tasks such as photo-taking, email-replying, report-writing etc, to each individual student and got them to take ownership of their roles. Ideally, all these tasks assigned to them should culminate to the materialization of an end-product which would definitely give them a sense of accomplishment and worth and that would certainly hold their interest in learning.
2) Learners should be engaged in a safe and non-threatening environment where the teachers do not (always) dictate what they should be doing. Instead, teachers should be more encouraging towards students voicing out their opinions and more forgiving towards them making mistakes during the process of learning. Learners should be able to feel ‘safe’ and respected for presenting their views or queries and not worry about being ridiculed or belittled.
3) Learners should be learning in a fun environment that epitomizes the (near) perfect study-playground for children. The teaching materials should be able to create a concrete visual manifestation of the concepts being taught so that the learners could relate to what was being delivered. In the first video, the concept of probability, algebra and geometry was taught using quilt-making which the children were actively-involved.
4) Learners should be made to understand that information is not specifically-compartmentalized within individual subject matter but it transcends beyond its boundaries and most things they learn in school are inter-related and inter-connected with one another. This could be done by having such interdisciplinary projects like those in the videos so that the learners understood the sense and relationships of the things they learnt. Thus, (hopefully) they might find meaning in their learning.
5) Learners should be allowed to maximize their dominant intelligence(s) and learn in their most preferred learning styles. Teachers should make conscious effort to understand the individual learner’s learning style and his/her prominent intelligence so that specific tasks could be assigned to the best person(s) for the job. When the learners enjoy doing the task the way they like it to be done, that would alleviate any confusion, anxiety or misunderstanding which might lead to loss of interest. The learners might most likely put in more thoughts and effort (and hence interest) in the assigned task.
6) Learners should be made to see how knowledge they gained from all the activities and tasks they were engaged in, could enrich them in so many ways. With the skills and information learnt, they could gain even more knowledge. For example, the reading and comprehension skills taught and mastered, the learners could gain much knowledge and understanding about other places, cultures, people etc. When they understand the benefits of education, then they could better appreciate its importance and vice versa.
In summary, to achieve successful teaching, we had to learn more (creative) ways to capture our learners’ attention before we began to exhaust our (old) bag of tricks, bore our learners to total disinterest and lose them altogether. After all, in the words of
Roland Marchand,
