Friday, 18 November 2011
Engagement vs Learning
An eye opener on this challenging key component of our practice. To help with learning geography of Canada (which is a review concept) I moved away from worksheet type activities and went for more creative, fun, hopefully learning activities. We played games with the atlases, movement around the classroom games, we developed mnemonics as a class: individually, in pairs shared them had a lot of fun in learning how to train our memory to help remember things. We played memory games, cut out all the provinces, capitals, etc used a map to match while playing, flipping over 2 to find a match, repeated saying/chanting "BC's capital is Victoria" Student engagement was very high, many "this is fun" type comments. I was feeling pretty smart, until I assessed them today! Retention of learning certainly was not what I hoped it would be. Disappointing overall result with a third of the class really not learnng it. So back to the drawing board. More of a balance needed with practice type activities and some of the games we learned, or...??? With that many kids not being successful I need to look at what I did and try to find a different, different lens!
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You know Kent, it is refreshing to read your blog... loved the honesty!... something that felt like it was working so well -- but didn't get you the results you were looking for. Great they had fun, but with all that you did, kind of hard to believe they didn't retain it! :) I would have thought so too. Would be interesting to ask the kids what happened.
ReplyDeleteI think you're probably on the right track with the "more of a balance needed with practice type activities and some of the games". Sometimes all that is needed is a small class reflection (discussion or writing) concerning the topic "why are we doing this? what are we supposed to be learning?" If kids are reminded WHY they are playing the game or doing an activity they are more likely to retain the information or skills you want them to (and it keeps the teacher focused on the purpose of the activity as well). Of course it's up to you how you incorporate the reflection or practice activities. High engagement is not to be taken lightly so you want to figure out a way to reinforce the learning outcomes (possibly within the activity itself) without completely killing the enjoyment and energy that you have gained. I like Judith's suggestion about asking the kids why they think they didn't learn it. It would also be interesting if there were certain ideas that they DID remember. Perhaps there was one particular activity that was very successful and others that were less effective. Perhaps some of the concepts you were covering were less (or more) suited to the activities than others. Whatever the case-it's impressive that you are willing to reflect so honestly on your own practice.
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