Active and Participatory Learning Opportunities

Students are learning all the time whether inside or outside the classroom. Ensure that your students are active in their learning so that they can practice what you teach them and gain confidence. Encourage them to work with all other students in their classroom even those with diverse backgrounds and abilities. Cooperation encourages acceptance and understanding. Still, working in pairs and small groups allows for better participation and interaction between students and also helps enhance independence and ability to work constructively with others. Some opportunities for active and participatory learning are:

Field visits

During such visits, students go to different places may be to observe specific organisms, natural phenomena and learning from experts. During these visits, you should sub-divide students into groups and assign each group different tasks. If you are visiting a power generating plant, they may enquire about the machines used, generation process, manpower employed, technology application and qualification for the plant’s employees. After the visit each group should use the information they gathered to prepare presentations or reports of their observations. You also discuss the importance of the plant in the society.

Depending on the nature of the field visit, you can undertake various actions before the visit to ensure that students will learn better during the trip. Some of these actions are:

• Conducting preparatory research, whole class discussion, or inquiry about what the students are likely to see during the trip.
• Finding opportunities to listen to and interview experts to help them understand what they will see during the trip.
• Obtaining assistance/permission from the administration of the place you are visiting.

Field visits enable active and participatory learning. It is also a form of integrated learning which involves mathematics, language and social sciences.

Games

Games that incorporate active learning improve students’ communication skills, and their analysis and decision-making analysis. Some of these games are puzzles and chess. You can change these games and their materials to connect more directly to the curriculum. For example, use the rugby ball to explain the trajectory concept.

Observe and discuss with your students the games they play. Do they involve local cultures? Are there games for men and women and why? Encourage them to try both games. You can as well connect their games to concepts that you taught like puzzles and critical thinking.

Both field trips and games ensure active and participatory learning. To ensure that students are more active, you should:

• Provide opportunities to students practice what they learned in class e.g. how streamlined bodies concept is used in designing airplanes and drones.
• Use teaching methods which allow participation of all students e.g. using tangible objects like maps and atlases.
• Use local real life examples which students can identify themselves with e.g. how optimization can be used to increase output in production industries.

Effective teaching means combining different teaching and learning approaches. This provides for individual student needs making classroom a lively and challenging place for betterment of students.

_{Featured Image: GD Goenka}