Learn the latest trends business innovation with the Educational Programe
Learn the latest trends business innovation with the Educational Programe
According to zoologist turned active learning expert Scott Freeman, and his colleagues, Keep a work progress journal:
Active Learning engages students in the process of learning through activities and/or discussion in class, as opposed to passively listening to an expert. It emphasizes higher order thinking and often involves group work”
Your working memory, hippocampus, and neocortex work together to form your declarative learning system. You are mostly conscious of what you’re learning with your declarative system – it declares information (facts and events)
The time it takes students to switch to and from these collaborative type activities can
help their hippocampus offload during declarative learning:
1) Think-pair-share: students think for a minute or two, then pair up and share their thoughts
2) One-minute summary: students write down what they have understood from what you just taught
3) One-minute muddiest point: students write down what they are confused about
4) Peer teaching: have students “teach” other students, or a partner, what you have just explained,
and then reverse their roles, making sure each student gets to work though the material with another student.
1. Make the mind work: To build and strengthen links directly in students’ neocortices, use retrieval practice.
This is an intense and demanding mental process.
2. Let the mind rest: For the hippocampus to offload information onto the neocortex, the student should not be
involved in intense mental activity.
So, how much of your teaching should be active? Optimal times vary by students’ age, the type of material being
covered, the level of students’ previous exposure to the material, and many other factors.
What’s more understand is what to avoid. Be careful not to go back to your desk to check your email or to organise
your materials while students are sharing their answers.
Not only does circulating among your students keep them on track, but also it builds rapport by showing that you are
genuinely interested in the understanding of the material.
Information in working memory is limited; too many pieces of information at once, and the mind can be overwhelmed.
The neutral links of long-term memory can activate and extend working memory.
Within any one classroom, there is a great deal of variability in working memory capacity among students
(resulting in differences in learning speed).
Breaking information and activities into smaller conceptual parts will combat too-heavy demands on students’ working memory.
Most students spend way too much time at the end on reading assignments and problem sets, causing them to feel constantly overwhelmed by their work.
Even if you finish all your assignments for a given class, you should continue to work. Take advantage of the situation to get ahead; but don’t try to force the situation to happen.
Getting ahead of class work frees up time to focus on big projects like paper writing or test preparation. If you find yourself with time to spare, start getting ahead of your obligations. However, it’s important that students triage their assignments:
The key is to decipher what is and what isn’t important. If your teacher emphasises the importance of a topic/assignment that you dismissed, then make a note that you will need to go back and cover this in more detail before the next exam.
Remember, if you don’t explicitly schedule a time to cover this material, you will invariably procrastinate and then find yourself with a huge reading list to cover right before the exam. So, how should students take smart notes on their assignments? First, students need to understand that if you write down very little, the assignment can be completed fast, but the time will be wasted because you won’t have bothered to extract the big ideas.
The question > evidence > conclusion (QEC) approach can work well for assignments; TLP recommends you apply it as follows:
TLP is a Not-For-Profit (NFP) community organisation started and run by volunteers looking to make a difference in the lives of PNG students.