My L1 Science class has just finished up their Mechanics Unit. To try and gently shift this class into being more independent, I used a OneNote I had prepared for my class for revision last year as the main source of information. There were lots of relevant notes, videos, office mix walk throughs of old exams (eg)and some practice worksheets. As we went through, I also included a forms quiz at the end of each page to as a way to keep up with where the class was at with their learning. We also use the SciPad, which is has some good notes and example questions.
Some screen shots of pages in the OneNote and quiz results.
On the whole it has worked well. My biggest concern is that my students are still struggling with managing themselves and I was feeling a little like I was leading the horse to water, but not getting it to drink. I was hoping that I would be able to use more of my class time answering questions and doing some practicals (we did do some practicals – popping balloons for pressure questions is AWESOME….) but it just didn’t quite work out that way. When I surveyed the students, I got the common theme that they liked notes from the board. ARGHHHHHHH. That they liked how I helped them when they needed it, but they wanted more up the front teaching. I already felt like I did way more than I wanted to. And (as in the pictures above) some of the OneNote pages where even like writing on the board…. sigh.
So I am back again to the drawing board. How can I make sure students feel like they are still learning things if they are managing their own learning? The test results were ok, but even with that students didn’t feel like they had learned anything, even when they clearly had. Why do students feel that they need to be ‘taught’ things in order to have learned them. Do I need to listen to this student voice and be up the front more rather than deliberately staying away.
In pondering this, here are some ideas (I went for pen and paper… so I could vigorously scribble) around why maybe students feel they need to be taught something rather than learn it.
There are lots of reasons why – to find out more I guess I need to ask my students some more questions around why the like to ‘learn’ in different ways.
And I need to think just a little bit more about how and why I am trying to model learning to my students.
Of these two definitions, I definitely like the second one. So how can I better model learning by example or experience? What learning experiences can I give my students that makes them feel like they are being taught?
ibpossum takes on tech 