At the recent MYSA conference (Middle Year School Association), Erica McWilliams talked about unlearning some educational ideas, before we can start to re-learn education for the future.
Classic example of moving away from memorisation... Deb had her class make an alphabet list of A-Z facts about Zambia. Some of the girls 'made up' facts and some just included random partial facts, just to get it completed. Deb talked to them about how to find information and reported back to them that 2 girls had done it accurately, a big group of girls in the middle had done an OK job and a couple of girls had it sent straight back to them to re-do. She then took the time to explain to them how to find good 'stuff' on the internet, how to check if it is reliable and how to reference the sites they visited. This is not 'tidy' learning, it is messy and individual. Compare that to a memorisation task = "Here is a list of facts about Zamia - learn them for a quiz on Friday." - this is tidy and easy, but is it valuable learning?
Classic example of moving away from memorisation... Deb had her class make an alphabet list of A-Z facts about Zambia. Some of the girls 'made up' facts and some just included random partial facts, just to get it completed. Deb talked to them about how to find information and reported back to them that 2 girls had done it accurately, a big group of girls in the middle had done an OK job and a couple of girls had it sent straight back to them to re-do. She then took the time to explain to them how to find good 'stuff' on the internet, how to check if it is reliable and how to reference the sites they visited. This is not 'tidy' learning, it is messy and individual.
ReplyDeleteCompare that to a memorisation task = "Here is a list of facts about Zamia - learn them for a quiz on Friday." - this is tidy and easy, but is it valuable learning?