extending student learning:
“For many students, learning doesn't become real until they have opportunities to do something with their knowledge in real-world settings (even if they're simulated)” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Too often, students begin each new task as if they were doing it for the first time. It seems each experience has no relationship to what has come before or what comes after, and that each event in life is separate and discrete, with no connections to what may have come before or with no relation to what follows. Their learning is so isolated that they seem unable to draw forth from one event and apply it in another situation.
“In short, the learning cycle is not fully complete until teachers help students find ways to actually put their knowledge to use. This means that, every day, all learning should ultimately be leading to application and extension. In the remainder of this chapter, we offer a few key ways that teachers can complete the learning cycle, helping students extend and apply their learning” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Relevant learning involves making connections. It means drawing on prior experience and past knowledge to understand and see the relevance of new concepts. This enhances students' success in the following ways:
“Simply stated, for knowledge to stick, students need to do something with it” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Sylvia Chard, Professor Emeritus of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta and co-author of Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach makes a great point: "In real life, we don't spend several hours at a time listening to authorities who know more than we do and who tell us exactly what to do and how to do it," she says. "We need to be able to ask questions of a person we're learning from. We need to be able to link what the person is telling us with what we already know. And we need to be able to bring what we already know and experiences we've had that are relevant to the topic to the front of our minds and say something about them” (Chard, 1998).
I remember when I was growing up, I often wondered “When am I EVER going to use this?” I was unable to see any real-world benefit to what I was learning, and thus, lost interest. Goodwin and Hubbell state “Another consequence of denying students opportunities to apply their learning is that school becomes, in a word, boring” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). I couldn’t agree more. I was often bored in school. Without seeing the bigger picture, I felt what I was learning was just busy work. I wasn’t given an opportunity to see how I could apply it to my life outside of school. “studies have shown that students' intrinsic motivation in core subject areas begins to drop off around age 9 and continues to fall throughout the secondary school years (Gottfried et al., 2001)” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). Sylvia Chard states "young children are inquisitive. They ask questions, wonder about things, and like to investigate interesting phenomena in their world” (Chard, 1998). We should encourage younger students to be curious both inside and outside of school. If we can keep students’ interested in learning by showing them how they can apply it, I feel that the students will be more inclined to continue their education and will enjoy and seek out learning.
Goodwin and Hubbell included a lot of learning strategies that teachers can use to extend student knowledge. They expressed the importance of being able to apply knowledge outside of the school setting. “In the world beyond school, what often matters most is one's ability to apply knowledge in thoughtful and creative ways” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). Here are some of the suggestions that Goodwin and Hubbell have in this regard:
Active Learning Strategies:
Using Writing to Extend Learning:
Effective Project Learning:
Heuristic Problem Solving:
We have expectations set for us as teachers: what we need to be teaching and what students need to be learning. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make learning creative and show students what they are learning is actually relevant to the real world. “The bottom line here is that if students never have the opportunity to extend and apply what they're learning, then it becomes less useful, memorable, or engaging. Therefore, when planning a unit, teachers should ask themselves, ‘What should students do with this knowledge?’” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Students often want to learn by doing -- rather than just listening. Marilyn Lombardi offers some great ideas around "authentic learning" that we can utilize to help students expand their learning by doing:
Authentic learning opportunities to extend and expand on student learning include:
I think it is also important to have the student’s parents be actively involved in helping their children apply what they are learning to real-world situations. I believe this is a great way to continue the learning process at home and for parents to take an active interest in what their children are learning. I found this list of ideas compiled by Deb Killian.
Activities Parents Can Do at Home:
We, as teachers, need to instill a love of learning in our students. We are all constantly learning everyday – learning does not end when school ends. If we can make learning fun and enjoyable, as well as showing how learning is applied outside of school, our students will thrive. “Although some may cling to the romantic view that the pure, unfettered joy of learning should motivate students, the reality is that, for most of us, almost everything we learn, we learn for a reason—whether it's for the utilitarian purpose of gaining the knowledge and skills we need to accomplish a goal or for the loftier and more erudite purposes of shaping (or reshaping) our view of how the world operates” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Goodwin and Hubbell made a great point that I hope will stick with me as I start my journey to becoming a teacher, and a point I hope I will keep in mind everyday: “When we show students how to put their learning to use for themselves and others, we truly unlock the gift of learning for them” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Too often, students begin each new task as if they were doing it for the first time. It seems each experience has no relationship to what has come before or what comes after, and that each event in life is separate and discrete, with no connections to what may have come before or with no relation to what follows. Their learning is so isolated that they seem unable to draw forth from one event and apply it in another situation.
“In short, the learning cycle is not fully complete until teachers help students find ways to actually put their knowledge to use. This means that, every day, all learning should ultimately be leading to application and extension. In the remainder of this chapter, we offer a few key ways that teachers can complete the learning cycle, helping students extend and apply their learning” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Relevant learning involves making connections. It means drawing on prior experience and past knowledge to understand and see the relevance of new concepts. This enhances students' success in the following ways:
- It helps students build on a body of knowledge rather than just accumulate information.
- It helps students learn how to apply concepts from one course or level to another and from school to work.
- It transforms rote learning to relevant learning.
- It stimulates critical thinking skills.
- It makes education meaningful by relating concepts to real life.
“Simply stated, for knowledge to stick, students need to do something with it” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Sylvia Chard, Professor Emeritus of Elementary Education at the University of Alberta and co-author of Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach makes a great point: "In real life, we don't spend several hours at a time listening to authorities who know more than we do and who tell us exactly what to do and how to do it," she says. "We need to be able to ask questions of a person we're learning from. We need to be able to link what the person is telling us with what we already know. And we need to be able to bring what we already know and experiences we've had that are relevant to the topic to the front of our minds and say something about them” (Chard, 1998).
I remember when I was growing up, I often wondered “When am I EVER going to use this?” I was unable to see any real-world benefit to what I was learning, and thus, lost interest. Goodwin and Hubbell state “Another consequence of denying students opportunities to apply their learning is that school becomes, in a word, boring” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). I couldn’t agree more. I was often bored in school. Without seeing the bigger picture, I felt what I was learning was just busy work. I wasn’t given an opportunity to see how I could apply it to my life outside of school. “studies have shown that students' intrinsic motivation in core subject areas begins to drop off around age 9 and continues to fall throughout the secondary school years (Gottfried et al., 2001)” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). Sylvia Chard states "young children are inquisitive. They ask questions, wonder about things, and like to investigate interesting phenomena in their world” (Chard, 1998). We should encourage younger students to be curious both inside and outside of school. If we can keep students’ interested in learning by showing them how they can apply it, I feel that the students will be more inclined to continue their education and will enjoy and seek out learning.
Goodwin and Hubbell included a lot of learning strategies that teachers can use to extend student knowledge. They expressed the importance of being able to apply knowledge outside of the school setting. “In the world beyond school, what often matters most is one's ability to apply knowledge in thoughtful and creative ways” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013). Here are some of the suggestions that Goodwin and Hubbell have in this regard:
Active Learning Strategies:
- Socratic Seminar -- Although teachers should ask questions to spark discussion and may occasionally need to redirect the discussion back to the topic at hand, they should resist the urge to control the conversation too closely because, ultimately, students must carry the conversation by themselves.
- The Final Word Protocol -- By encouraging students to discuss the text multiple times, the Final Word Protocol greatly increases student comprehension of what they're reading.
- Written Conversation -- Sometimes called legalized note passing is a simple strategy in which students write short responses to teacher-provided, thought-provoking questions about the text and then pass their responses back and forth to one another. This strategy effectively engages all students in class discussion at the same time.
Using Writing to Extend Learning:
- Summary Narrative -- Such assignments are engaging for students, but they also require students to process and actively make meaning of what they're reading.
- Essay Writing -- Key to designing an effective essay assignment is to ensure that it aligns with learning objectives and engages and challenges students.
- Learning from Exemplary Writing -- they learn how to mimic the music or art of the masters in order to develop their own talents.
Effective Project Learning:
- Be clear what knowledge you want your students to develop or integrate -- Projects, on the other hand, are most beneficial when they are designed to help students apply and integrate existing knowledge.
- Be clear what you want students to think about while doing the project -- Learning opportunities should be designed to have students think about and apply their learning.
- Frame student learning around a driving question -- Driving questions, as it turns out, prompt students to generate and test hypotheses, which McREL's own research on instruction has found to be one of the most powerful strategies for supporting student learning.
Heuristic Problem Solving:
- Ask students to generate and test hypotheses -- When students generate and test hypotheses, they start from a point of ignorance—they don't know the solution. They must integrate existing knowledge into a hypothesis and then choose from alternative courses of action to test their hypothesis.
- Use the web for inquiry projects -- This approach requires students to spend a designated amount of time searching the Internet and other resources for information and then writing about or creating a product based on what they find.
- Arrange and entire unit as heuristic -- teachers might construct an entire unit around a complex problem, introducing students to smaller chunks of knowledge or procedures that build toward the solution to the heuristic or larger problem.
- Teach problem solving to students -- A useful problem-solving mnemonic, developed by Bransford and Stein (1984), is IDEAL: Identify the problem, Define and represent the problem, Explore possible solution strategies, Act on the strategies, and Look back and evaluate.
We have expectations set for us as teachers: what we need to be teaching and what students need to be learning. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t make learning creative and show students what they are learning is actually relevant to the real world. “The bottom line here is that if students never have the opportunity to extend and apply what they're learning, then it becomes less useful, memorable, or engaging. Therefore, when planning a unit, teachers should ask themselves, ‘What should students do with this knowledge?’” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Students often want to learn by doing -- rather than just listening. Marilyn Lombardi offers some great ideas around "authentic learning" that we can utilize to help students expand their learning by doing:
Authentic learning opportunities to extend and expand on student learning include:
- Real-world relevance
- Ill-defined problem
- Sustained investigation
- Multiple sources and perspectives
- Collaboration
- Reflection
- Interdisciplinary perspectives
- Integrated assessment
- Polished products
- Multiple interpretations and outcomes
- Simulation-Based Learning
- Student-Created Media
- Inquiry-Based Learning
- Peer-Based Evaluation
- Working with Remote Instruments
- Working with Research Data
- Reflecting and Documenting Achievement (Lombardi, 2007)
I think it is also important to have the student’s parents be actively involved in helping their children apply what they are learning to real-world situations. I believe this is a great way to continue the learning process at home and for parents to take an active interest in what their children are learning. I found this list of ideas compiled by Deb Killian.
Activities Parents Can Do at Home:
- Implement lessons at home. Apply science and math lessons to things around the house. For example, if your child’s science class is completing a unit on temperature, ask your child to check the temperature outside on an outside thermometer and apply the Fahrenheit and Celsius formula to convert it.
- Practice fractions. Think of tasks that can apply the use of fractions or parts, such as cooking or checking the oil gauge in your car so they will better understand this concept in the real world.
- Use current events. Prompt kids to read the newspaper then write a creative story from the headlines. This teaches them to convert expository text into real world creative ideas while improving their thinking and writing abilities.
- Budget together. Ask kids to make a household budget for a month. Subtract common expenses such rent, utilities and car payments. Make it a game to apply what they learn in math. Hold friendly competitions between siblings to see who has the most money left at the end of each month after expenses.
- Create word problems. Make up every day situational math problems (word problems) that involve multiple operations and mathematical skills. Using this type of problem to illustrate real world use of math skills is perhaps the best way to get them to see that math skills ARE important.
- Go shopping. Take kids to the store with you and ask them to help you pick out items from a list. Instruct them to stay within the budget allotted and to estimate the amount of the purchase while shopping. This activity incorporates several math skills into real world applications including budgeting, subtraction, addition and estimation as well as critical thinking.
- Publish a book. Writing skills can be made more fun with digital technology. Encourage kids to create a digital online book with their own stories. Ask them to illustrate their books with pictures and use attractive fonts. Several programs online do this for them without expertise required. The use of technology appeals to kids of all ages and they will be proud to share their creations with friends on social media.
- Put on a show. Have kids put on a puppet show or play with neighborhood friends, acting out a story. Most state standards now require some knowledge of poetry, dramatic arts, acting and playwriting. This is a fun way to fulfill this standard and a good social activity too.
- Make math a game. Create estimation games by placing several hundred jellybeans in a jar and practice figuring out the probability of certain colors. Make it extra exciting by allowing kids to eat some as they figure out the probability problems.
- Learn from movie night. Teach inference and other thinking skills when watching a movie. Let them see the first five minutes of a movie or television show then turn off the TV and ask them to write or act out their own ending. The ending must make sense, but does not have to be what actually occurs in the show. Allow kids to explore their imaginations while exploring viable creation options to storylines. (Killian, 2014)
We, as teachers, need to instill a love of learning in our students. We are all constantly learning everyday – learning does not end when school ends. If we can make learning fun and enjoyable, as well as showing how learning is applied outside of school, our students will thrive. “Although some may cling to the romantic view that the pure, unfettered joy of learning should motivate students, the reality is that, for most of us, almost everything we learn, we learn for a reason—whether it's for the utilitarian purpose of gaining the knowledge and skills we need to accomplish a goal or for the loftier and more erudite purposes of shaping (or reshaping) our view of how the world operates” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
Goodwin and Hubbell made a great point that I hope will stick with me as I start my journey to becoming a teacher, and a point I hope I will keep in mind everyday: “When we show students how to put their learning to use for themselves and others, we truly unlock the gift of learning for them” (Goodwin and Hubbell, 2013).
References
Bransford, J., & Stein, B. (1984). The IDEAL problem solver. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Chard, S.C. (1998) The Project Approach: Making Curriculum Come Alive (Book One). NY: Scholastic.
Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. R. (2013). The 12 touchstones of good teaching: A checklist for staying focused every day. ASCD.
Killian, D. (2014) Teaching kids to transfer learning to real world situations. Retrieved from
http://www.brighthubeducation.com/parenting-grade-schoolers/128497-transferring-learning-to-real-life/.
Lombardi, M.M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause Learning Initiative. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3009.pdf.
Bransford, J., & Stein, B. (1984). The IDEAL problem solver. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Chard, S.C. (1998) The Project Approach: Making Curriculum Come Alive (Book One). NY: Scholastic.
Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. R. (2013). The 12 touchstones of good teaching: A checklist for staying focused every day. ASCD.
Killian, D. (2014) Teaching kids to transfer learning to real world situations. Retrieved from
http://www.brighthubeducation.com/parenting-grade-schoolers/128497-transferring-learning-to-real-life/.
Lombardi, M.M. (2007). Authentic learning for the 21st century: An overview. Educause Learning Initiative. Retrieved from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eli3009.pdf.