Tags: Classroom Teacher | Teaching and Learning | Teaching Assistant | Teaching Tips
The human brain learns best when it has a variety of ways to take in new information. The key is to provide children with a smorgasbord of methods to sample new information, because the brain searches for novelty.
Action Steps
The following are opportunities that we can provide learners with:
Reflection – get learners to write about a topic covered during a lesson,including how they plan to use it.
Visual – get learners to watch a related video or construct a mind map withimages of what they have learnt.
Auditory – get learners to talk in pairs about what they have learnt.
Somatic – get learners to build a model of what they have learnt.
Intellectual – get small teams of learners to try and solve three challenging problems on a given subject.
Questioning – hold a press conference at the end of a lesson and allow learners to ask questions on any content that they do not yet understand.
What is a Teacher’s Job?
A teacher’s job is to help a child discover their intelligence.
Action Steps
By designing your curriculum holistically you can incorporate the following into lessons:
- Relationship and rapport building
- Creating a positive environment for learning.
- Connecting personal growth and life skills with all learning.
- Personal development that centres on the child’s evaluation of themselves.
- Learning to learn and learning to think.
- Developing a classroom culture of confidence-building amongst learners.
- Creating an environment of collaboration amongst learners.
- Ensuring you appeal to a variety of different learning styles.
Coping with Varying Levels of Prior Knowledge
Here is a quick and easy way to find out what pupils already know about a subject and move the whole class towards having a higher level of knowledge.
- At the start of the session, get each child to mind map everything they know about a particular subject.
- Then ask learners to get into groups of three.
- In these groups, each pupil teaches the other learners three things on their mind map the others did not know.
- Each learner writes these down and adds these to their own mind map.
- Each group of three presents their mind map for one minute and the other groups add any new information to their mind maps.
This article first appeared in Teaching Expertise, December 2004.
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