Topic 2 Contemporary didactic
Imagining today’s lessons without using active and modern teaching methods is impossible. They facilitate the transfer of knowledge in an exciting way, teach creative problem-solving, arouse children’s interests, and enable them to gain new experiences, including interpersonal ones. The emotional involvement of students is also essential for the learning process. Children learn more quickly if they are interested in the subject and understand its benefits. Therefore, we emphasize using activating methods as often as possible.
Modern activating methods include the following:
The educational project method – team solving of complex problems, only under the supervision of a teacher, allows young people to develop and improve the skills most sought after in the modern labor market: cooperation in a group, independent search for knowledge, independence in taking action, critical thinking, problem-solving, presentation and evaluation of the effects of their own and teamwork.
The essence of the educational project method is to introduce students to a designed situation in which they are obliged to take various actions to complete a specific task at the indicated time and by the agreed plan (i.e., by the adopted schedule). An adequately designed project assumes three levels of students’ educational activity:
- Emotional – the actions of young people in the project are designed to shape their specific attitudes and achieve academic goals;
- intellectual – through the implementation of the tasks assigned to them in the project, young people collect and consolidate a certain amount of knowledge, construct their information resources for concluding;
- practical – the information obtained and processed during the work on the implementation of the project is used by young people to solve a functional problem in the project while improving specific skills and social competencies.
When constructing tasks for an educational project, especially ones addressed to young people from rural areas, it is essential to remember that they should be as interdisciplinary as possible, i.e., those for which it is necessary to solve a problem covering several fields of science. For example, a project on ecology may include tasks in law, social sciences, and others, the practical use of which is necessary for planning actual activities in the social environment.
It would be best if you also remembered the proper planning of the project and presenting its assumptions to students. Project planning should include the subject and objectives of the project, the expected effect of the project, a description of how students’ work is organized (e.g., whether the project is carried out individually or in groups), a report of the tasks planned to be performed as part of the project, and rules for presenting the finished project.
To find out more about the educational project method, visit this site.
– the WebQuest method is similar in form to the educational project method. The difference between the two methods is that both the structure and the course of WebQuest are focused primarily on the wide use of online knowledge resources and tools of information and communication technology by students and on developing the ability to effectively use them in solving educational tasks and problems. Therefore, since WebQuest assumes the improvement of information competencies of a universal nature, we can assume that it shapes young people’s skills in the field of:
- collecting information from Internet resources;
- sorting (distinguishing information needed from unnecessary information);
- verification and evaluation (distinguishing reliable and trustworthy information from unreliable and erroneous);
- classify, group, and sequence information;
- processing information and using it to solve current problems.
Much of WebQuest takes place in a virtual environment. The activities of the teacher and students are carried out on a website or educational platform where you publish instructions, upload teaching materials, and communicate between you and project participants. During the performance of tasks, students use digital devices, computer programs, and internet applications; therefore, starting work with this method, you should have at least basic skills related to the use of ICT tools, such as using e-mail, using internet messengers or using the most popular MS Office programs. It is worth emphasizing that the great advantage of working with this method is the possibility of improving and updating IT and information competencies by students and their teachers.
the basic assumption of this method is to change the place of performing tasks performed by students in the course of classes with the work done by them at home. This means that students are provided with a set of materials that they have to familiarise themselves with within extra-curricular time, while during school hours, there is a discussion about the content and practice of related skills. In the course of the lesson, you can therefore allow yourself more freedom – conduct experiments, arrange problematic situations,s and clarify any doubts of students, based on the theoretical information they have already acquired.
The flipped classroom is a method that transfers responsibility for the quality of the educational process from the teacher to the student. Its main advantage is that it allows for the individualisation of education, thanks to which students with better academic results and those with less knowledge and skills can work effectively on a specific topic. However, its scope in both indicated cases will be different. Furthermore, flipped classroom mobilises students to their activity. It motivates them to act because it requires spending time outside the lessons to analyse the material provided to understand the issues presented in it. Increasing students’ involvement means they remember program content faster and more permanently. Reversing the way of teaching also positively affects the interactions between the teacher and individual members of the group of teenagers. Also, it changes the course of managing work in the classroom to a more democratic one, based on discussion and clash of views.
classes conducted in the field help to understand the existing dependencies in the surrounding environment and allow you to test your knowledge and skills in practical action. They develop ingenuity, creativity, and independence in students.
Field exercises facilitate the course of cognitive processes, integrate information from various fields of science and prepare for teamwork. During outdoor activities (in this example: in the natural environment), we can, for example, draw attention to the positive and negative human impact on the environment, explaining what interdisciplinarity means in the modern world. Therefore, those exercises can also play an essential role in shaping the ecological awareness of young people. Field activities, if properly planned, can have a didactic, cognitive, and emotional significance – shape attitudes, influence one’s interests, and motivate one to acquire knowledge and experience independently.
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The use of field exercises is of course not limited to the issue of ecology. Mathematics classes should also go into the field and teach, for example, estimating numbers in controlled conditions. In this case, the area may be a supermarket where young people, having a certain amount of money, would shop and estimate how much money they have already spent and still have for other shopping.
consists of creating a fictional background and a group of characters with whom young people identify for a given topic of the lesson. It is a method of work valued by students, as it is a form of extending the free play with peers and is in line with the old maxim “learning by playing”
In the drama technique, youth, while having fun, acquire new skills as if involuntarily. Conducting lessons with this method also causes a substantial emotional involvement of students and, thus, a much faster and more permanent acquisition of knowledge, skills, and social competencies. Let’s imagine a biology lesson, at the beginning of which you outline the plot background, according to which all living people except you have turned into zombies for unknown reasons, and only thanks to your joint work on identifying cells under a microscope will it be possible to win against the plague.
Watch this short video: Creativity in the classroom (in 5 minutes or less!), and think for a while: What might be the results of limiting students’ creativity? How can this affect their careers and everyday struggles?