How To Make A Child an Active Learner?
A baby learns that his needs will be fulfilled when he cries. Therefore, he repeats this act whenever he is hungry or feels uncomfortable. In the early stages, children imitate actions and learn things that give them joy. Therefore, it is rightly said that the ‘Human Child’ is one of the most intelligent creations of God, as learning in a child begins from the day he steps into this world.
The greatest challenge for a teacher today is to provide the right learning atmosphere and learning content to arouse the interest in children to learn. If a child cannot learn in a way we teach, then we must teach in a way through which the child can learn. Our school, which is the best CBSE school in Indirapuram Ghaziabad has realized that this can be easily achieved through ‘Active Learning’.
Active learning is an approach to instruction that involves actively engaging students with the course material through discussions, problem-solving, case studies, role plays and other methods. Active learning approaches place a greater degree of responsibility on the learner than passive approaches such as lectures, however, instructor guidance is still crucial in the active learning classroom. Active learning activities may range in length from a couple of minutes to whole class sessions or may take place over multiple class sessions. Active learning is based on a theory called constructivism.
Constructivism emphasizes the fact that learners construct or build their own understanding.
Constructivists argue that learning is a process of ‘making meaning’.
Learners develop their existing knowledge and understanding to achieve deeper levels of understanding. This means that learners are more able to analyze, evaluate and synthesize ideas, in this way achieving the higher-order skills of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Skilled teachers make these deeper levels of understanding more possible by providing learning environments, opportunities, interactions, tasks and instruction that foster deep learning.
Today, children act as partners in learning. They learn things better and faster by doing activities themselves and experiencing them. We, as the best school in Ghaziabad, focus on the importance of experiential learning. The hands-on activities make children better learners. Children also need appropriate encouragement and appreciation. They learn even better when their efforts are recognized and appreciated. Adding a ‘fun element’ to learning enhances and eases the overall learning process.
We, as the best school in Indirapuram, have observed that when the class is divided into different groups and are assigned tasks, the competition and thrill encourage them to explore, experiment, explain and excel.
Additionally, age-appropriate tasks should be assigned to children as their attention span is just twice or thrice their age. If the tasks are too challenging, then the children will lose focus and interest.
Establishing advanced techniques like creating mind maps, spider diagrams, fishbone diagrams and flow charts help to break down the concepts of the subjects taught in classrooms, into a simpler and easy-to-understand structure. This enables the children to improve their connection to the subject matter.
Facilitating a classroom environment that is conducive and caters to the learning demands, a substantial amount of engagement through dialogue and discussions and at the same time also promotes peer engagement results in improved learning capability.
Therefore, it is indeed the need of the hour to support, provide and facilitate each child to become an active learner by inculcating the best practices of active learning and combining the mentioned strategies.
This will ensure to groom a more successful, confident and independent generation of self-learning children for the future.
Related Keywords
