It took almost a century to begin to question the efficacy of a teaching model based on the pure transmission of information, where the teacher sat in the chair and sent an infinite amount of uni-directional notions to the learner.
To tell the truth, if something is changing in primary and secondary schools, unfortunately it is enough to move to the university to find this model again.
If you are reading this article you are probably an active teacher and just like us, you believe in the need to shift the focus from what I can teach to what my students are really learning.
It is therefore time to field time, creativity, authenticity to animate, involve and create optimal teaching learning situations!
Where to begin with?
Here are the three main points on which you can start to modify your way of teaching.
1. Concreteness
Surprise your students giving a demonstration of the concrete use of what you are teaching, something close to what they may have lived. Use all your resources to build open situations and different applicability. Therefore try to “see or perceive” how the knowledge and skills you are acquiring can be really useful to you. Start from the interest of the students themselves and make the most of connections with their everyday lives. You can tell a story, show them a video or simulate situations in which to make their learning take place.
2. Active Pedagogy
By active pedagogy we intend to create many problem-situations and plan a learning process in successive stages made up for trials and errors.
As you well know, learning is not memorizing, but re-structuring their own comprehension system of the world. Each of us is stimulated to learn “only” when we have an objective to reach, when it has to restore a broken balance, when it wants to better manage a particular situation. It is only starting from the error that you can understand what is missing to generate a new learning. Creating problem-situations means placing the student in the almost certainty of making mistakes. The role of the teacher must be that of guiding the student in their research for solutions without identifying themselves as the expert that imposes their knowledge.
3. Involve students in practical actions
If in theory everyone knows that we learn only if we are driven by an internal motivation, in practice we still fall into the mistake of setting up education for learning, in the form of blackmail or condition.
If you do not study you get a bad grade, study because it is your duty, if you pass you get a scooter, if you do not pay attention to the class you do not do the interval, if you do not do your homework your parents will not send you to football class anymore. In this way the student is hardly motivated to learn, indeed in many cases total rejection is born and at school the root of all their problems.
Remember that the desire to grow and learn is innate, it is lost as you grow up because at a certain point the kid does not find a sense to commit themselves to grow. The duty of teachers is that of always finding new ways to involve and nurture the pupil’s desire to feel realize, useful and actively participating.
A task for you!
From tomorrow try to put the attention on which is your method put in place to be able to generate interest among your students, check if you happen to use “forms of blackmail”. Now that the argument is fresh in your mind, put immediately in practice the modifications. Begin to engage pupils in practical actions that see themselves as protagonists of the learning process and to encourage them to continue learning, leverage on the success of a goal achieved.
