Certainly, learners should take responsibility for their own learning to have some control of the situation. Much of my strategizing about teaching centers around getting students to take an active role in their own learning. For example, I teach physics in a classroom that has three walls covered with whiteboards. When it is time to practice problems, I write some problems on the boards and set out markers in many colors and prompt the class several times to select a problem and begin writing or drawing a solution. Sometimes I leave the room for a little while. Eventually, students will take to the boards, often only after having safely worked the problem on paper. At the end of one semester, an education student shared with me that I kept asking for volunteers to go to the boards, and after a while, he came to understand that I meant for students to rise from their seats, take a place at the board, and and begin working problems. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced before! Until then, I didn’t realize that “active learning” was so much the exception. In all my classes, I strive to choreograph exercises and strategies that get students out of seats and interacting with one another and the material, especially if it can be fun.

Being inspired rather than taught. I hope this is my learners’ philosophy.

LikeLike

I see your point about the challenges with such large classes. I have graded for a class of 227 students and it can be very overwhelming (especially for someone who is not that good at face recognition and name memorization) but implementing ways of making a personal connection does help and you have the span of a semester to work your way through it. It might not come easy to make a connection with every single student but it is inspiring to see the different mechanisms that educators are coming up with to engage their students. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharing Ruoding! I think you have an interesting idea on maybe redirecting some of the education fees and invest them in creating new ways of learning such as a game-based method. I agree with your reasons on why there is some push-back in adopting some of these techniques but hopefully as the conversation around these topics intensifies, the educational system will take notice and follow suit.

I absolutely believe we can learn from playing games. In middle school, I remember playing a modified version of “Jeopardy” against my classmates to help us study content for tests. For some reason, the competition factor (and ultimately the thrill of victory) in these games really motivated me to learn the material I was to be tested on. Additionally, there are SO MANY digital games for young children that are meant to facilitate learning (e.g. Leapster, Hooked on Phonics, etc.). There are even apps for your phone that include games components geared towards learning everything from languages to anatomy. If games weren’t somewhat successful at engaging people in learning, I doubt they’d keep coming out with them every time you turn around.

I strongly agree with your point that video games have positive impacts on mental agility. I play a lot of video games when I feel tired of doing research. Every time after playing two or three hours, I feel my brain is totally refreshed.

The barriers you identified are very real, in my opinion. I think a great attempt to overcome some of them are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).s MOOs are online courses aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as filmed lectures, readings, and problem sets, many MOOCs provide interactive user forums to support community interactions among students, professors, and teaching assistants. Many of these MOOCs can be taken at the student’s leisure allowing them the flexibility to take the class when they can devote attention learning. As listed above, the variety of materials allow students to learn any way they see fit without the threat of judgment. The biggest barrier these MOOCs are able to hurdle is funding. MOOCs are open access and free to anyone who has internet access. Unfortunately, this does prevent those in underdeveloped or rural parts of the world from accessing the content. Though MOOCs aren’t perfect, they do have a lot to offer.

LIndsay,
Thank you for your comment! The Foreign Policy Attitude Test is done internally when the student first signs up for Statecraft and I get to see what their score is on the test, but I have no directions concerning how those scores are interpreted by the system. Unfortunately, the test is not administered at the end of the the simulation. It would be an interesting analytic to see if their attitudes have indeed changed. This is something I will ask the CEO/co-founder.

I remember playing a math game on the original apple computers my elementary school had in the computer lab. You had to solve problems to progress through a cave, avoid pirates, and reach the treasure chest at the very end. Despite hating math class, I LOVED that game. It made learning a difficult and undesirable subject fun! I agree that digital games can be a useful tool to more effectively engage students in learning.

Thanks for sharing Michelle! I really liked your post and the creative mechanism you used to teach 8-year-olds about the basis of programming. It serves as proof that even a subject that most people would find “highly technical” can be adapted in creative ways to ease understanding. I think that too often people argue that some of the more technical and theoretical subjects cannot be taught in any other way than the standard of unidirectional transfer of information from a teacher to the students. Your example is a testament to the contrary!

I agree, lectures are not the only way to produce knowledge, nor are they even a good way, perhaps. They operate on the level of inequality, because a lecture presupposes one subject (a person, the teacher in this case) above the rest.