Learner Centered Strategies for Engaging Creativity and Critical Thinking

Marshall G. Jones | http://coe.winthrop.edu/jonesmg/lti/pal

 
 


I'll start this off with one of my favorite quotes:

If teaching was telling, we’d all be so smart we wouldn’t know what to do.
Robert Mager (1984)


But teaching isn’t telling, even though many people treat it that way. Many of us have had the experience of not understanding a new concept or idea. Good teachers will provide an example of the new concept or idea. But what happens if Hands holding up a globeyou don’t understand the example? Usually the teacher will repeat the example for you. And if you still don’t understand the example, perhaps it will be repeated a third time, only slower. I don’t say this pejoratively. Kent Gustafson, one of my professors in graduate school, once said to me that if you could show up to class with five different examples of a difficult concept then anybody in the class could learn the concept. But the problem is most of us can’t come up with five good examples of a difficult concept. Most of us can develop one or two good examples. So when a student doesn’t understand our example of the concept we often have to revert to simply restating it. This is not teaching; this is telling.

In successful teaching information is presented, but students should be given the opportunity to practice the new skills in a safe environment where they can get informative feedback before they are assessed on the materials. Our job is  to create these environments.


When you set up teaching and learning environments you are trying to develop environments where people are presented with the information and have the opportunity to practice using the information, or performing the task, in a safe and supportive environment before their final assessment. This means that students should have the opportunity to try, make mistakes, get corrective feedback, and operationalize their understanding of the concept before they take the test. One way that you can do this is by setting up a learning environment where students are actively engaged, at times both cognitively and physically, inRobot boy the learning process. I call this participatory, active learning (PAL), not so much as a new educational idea  but as a way to help you remember what the learning environment should be, namely one where students are actively participating in their own learning. Learning with technology is not an idea that is original to me. It is has been a long time coming. I do call it participatory , active learning (PAL) because it helps reinforce the strategies I teach my students at Winthrop University. But let's face it: it is a  nice acronym, isn’t it? My work has its roots in problem based learning to be sure, but more specifically,  Mindtools (Jonassen, 1999) Leggo – Logo (Papert, 1980), and, truth be told, all the way back to the Greeks and the original notion of techné (Saettler, 1990) to name but a handful of people and ideas.

 

Techniques for Participatory Active Learning

  1. Podcasting
  2. Digital Video
  3. Digital Story Telling
  4. Claymation
  5. PowerPoint (yes, PowerPoint)

 

References

Jonassen, D. H. (1999). Computers as Mindtools for Schools: Engaging Critical Thinking. 2nd Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ. Merrill Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Mager, R. F. (1984). Goal analysis. (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: David S. Lake Publishers.

Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books.

Saettler, P. (1990). The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Englewood, CO. Libraries Unlimited.

 

PAL Home | Podcasting | Video | Digital Story Telling | PowerPoint | Claymation

First posted 10/08/2008. Original material copyright Marshall G. Jones, Winthrop University, 2008.
Use with permission of the author.
http://marshallgjones.com