Breaking traditional habits

As teachers, we often face challenges engaging our students in topics that they do not find important or relevant to their own lives. Though we may be competent in teaching a subject, students are unable to retain learning material that do not fully connect with them.

With this in mind, it’s time for us to question effectiveness of formal teaching methods and whether didactic teaching, where teachers are giving out lessons to students, fits the needs of our learners today.

To better understand best practices for teaching and learning, we must begin to understand the importance of real-world, practical intelligence, apart from school intelligence (Resnick, 1987). This brings us to the topic of ‘out of school learning’, where opportunities are generated for students to step out of the classroom to build on their experiences. Examples include nature walks, field trips or volunteer work that enables student to make real world connections.

As a former educator, I have personally witnessed students in my classroom benefit from conducting scientific activities outside of the classroom where they are able to see real life artifacts instead of referring to images from a text. The experience helped bridged the gap between school learning and scientific learning which is found to be a way to increase student motivation and help students expand their skills and abilities (Fallik, 2013).

Compared to formal teaching methods, out of school learning exhibits strengths that is vital to the learning process. First, when out of classroom learning takes place, we step away from ‘passive learning,’ where students are expected to memorize information, and we move closer to deeper content understanding. Next, outside experiences not only allows real-world application, but enables knowledge and skill to be socially shared (Resnick, 1987).

By breaking away from traditional settings, we not only enhance positive collaboration, but we enhance the process of learning itself. Due to distributed or shared cognition, knowledge is transformed and circulates throughout a system, forming interactions between the environment, the people and the resources at hand (Resnick, 1987).

Contrary, what is perceived as weaknesses of out of school learning involves a lack of adequate supervision since learners have autonomy to customize their own learning experience. Additionally, learning is unstructured which could lead to lack of direction or learning loss. With this considered, it is evident that with more freedom, students will have more responsibility to take charge of their own learning outcome.

Effective learning begins when we begin to consider the teaching methods that fit our students best interests and when we exhibit the courage to break away from traditional school norms. So here I ask, what kind of teacher will you be for your students?

Let's think about this some more! Please see the video below:

References

Fallik, O., Rosenfeld, S., & Eylon, B. (2013). School and out-of-school science: A model for

bridging the gap. Studies in Science Education, 49(1), 69-91.

Prince Ea. (2018, Sep. 3). Before you go to school, watch this. [Video]. Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PsLRgEYf9E

Resnick, L. B. (1987). Learning in school and out. Educational Researcher, 16(9), 13-20.