VALUE IN CLASSROOM VARIETY

 By: Dr. Armãndo R. Tolliver | EDUCATOR | January 20, 2017

            Being a teacher is certainly a complex job. It has so many variables that teachers are never sure that they are doing the best work possible. Instruction is the basic work of a teacher. The goal is that each student learns the course content, develops the established skills, and performs at the highest level. Such a goal implies a wide set of tasks that a teacher has to do. The following list presents just some of them: a) select the modes of teaching, b) design the instructional activities, c) choose or design the learning materials, d) identify students' learning and emotional needs, e) address students' needs in an effective way, f) create a classroom environment that fosters learning, g) organize all instructional elements into a coherent and effective whole, h) maximize instructional time, i) implement decisions in a successful way, and j) identify instructional problems and solve them. How we decide to provide instruction is important for diverse groups of learners. Therefore, any action requires selecting and implementing a variety of powerful instructional methods that simultaneously address a variety of different learning needs.

The apprehension of knowledge can be done following two dimensions, both individual and collective. When talking about learning, the individual dimension of knowledge refers to the process that each person follows to access, understand, and incorporate knowledge. This dimension relies mostly on the learner’s skills and peculiarities. The collective dimension deals with the influence social and cultural variables have on the learning process. Therefore, it relies on communication, and is affected by the roles language and discourse play. Learning theories focus on different dimensions. While behaviorism restricts its analysis to the individual dimension, cognitivism and especially constructivism expand it to include the collective one. These dimensions of knowledge define two important variables of learning: a) content and b) context. Learning seems to be affected not only by the content to be apprehended and its relationship to the individual characteristics of the learner, but also by the context in which that content is presented and the one in which the learning takes place. Therefore, learning has to take place in a context that is comfortable and familiar to the learner. This establishes a very complicated formula for determining which instructional practices best fit the requirements of the curriculum.

It is possible to devise some general concepts related to best practices. However, in terms of actually selecting best instructional practices, it would be necessary to know the purpose of the instruction, the content, the environment in which learning would best happen, and the nature of the learners. Accordingly, an investigation of best instructional practices depends on how instruction is delivered, and not on what should be presented. It then becomes the responsibility of the teacher to determine how best to achieve the objectives of the instruction with the students who are to receive it. Basically, the best practices are those that work best. Probably the only way to know this is to try a variety of instructional strategies and determine how well they work. I often find myself turning through my Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) Glossary of Strategies and Activities for active learning ideas.
           Have you ever considered turning traditional team meetings and study sessions into netmeetings or videoconferences? Perhaps, you have tried conducting group conference calls for absent students or live recording your lessons for students to review key concepts later in the week? If you have not, I encourage you to try it. I have and these methods have been a great way to add variety to the added instructional supports for students, alongside provide accommodations to all students across the board.

Personally, I value collaboration in the classroom. It provides the social structure that many students require and practice in articulating their understanding. When implementing instructional strategies and activities with my students, I found that by involving others in their learning, each student had the opportunity to revise their thinking and check his or her understanding in a risk-free response environment. In choosing activities, I try to be vigilant to always include an introduction and closure to the lesson.

When I first tried an AVID strategy, I started small, but made certain to incorporate a combination of writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading strategies. I planned a lesson to address the problem of water scarcity, adapted from The Water Project. Before beginning, I explained to students why we were doing the series of activities in this lesson and how it will aid them in the learning process. This activity required some set up but quickly transformed the classroom into three rural community stations to show students the differences between water abundance, economic scarcity and physical scarcity. Student groups had to go through three different stations for approximately 5 minutes each (used an online stopwatch on the projector and played music to assist with transitions) and fill a water bottle with the resources that were set aside for their particular group using specific instructions in order to experience the effects of water scarcity. The stations included: a) water abundance, b) physical scarcity, and c) economic scarcity.

In the first station, Water Abundance, students were able to see their water bottle (symbolic of their population) overflowing into a bowl with little effort and quite early on during the activity. The second station, Physical Scarcity, required students to prioritize which segment of their population (agriculture, industry, human) were most important to receive a portion of the limited resource, water. The exercise was set up so this station would never truly be satisfied as they simply did not have enough water to fill their whole bottle. The challenge for students was to process what happens when part of their resources are not fulfilled (hunger, poverty, health, etc.).

The last station was Economic Scarcity. In this station, though students technically had enough water, they just could not easily access it. Their “potential” clean water was sealed and prohibited while the resource that they were permitted to use was far away (on the other side of the room) and dirty. This symbolizes the resources, such as underground water, that the population did not have access to for economic reasons. Further, they had to carry an extra weight with them as they walked, individually, across the room. The weight here was symbolic of the physical burden of collecting water, while the individual walk, was meant to remind students of the vulnerability and dangers of the process. This third station simply ran out of time before their water bottles were filled. This was symbolic of the fact that people in this situation often do not have enough time to both collect water and earn an income.

At the end of the 5-minute period, students spent a few minutes evaluating their decisions, making honest reflections about how water is accessed around the world, and how priorities impact the use of water in their Science Eco Logs before rotating stations. At the end of the activity, a discussion of the concepts and challenges relating to water scarcity was much more effective as students had experienced water scarcity in a more tangible way. I decided to do a spin off this activity, instead from a solar energy perspective, and the variety of student outcomes was pretty decent. We will step it up a notch next time.

 

Suggested Citation

Tolliver, A. R. (2017). Value in Classroom Variety. [Education Project Online]. Retrieved online at http://www.educationprojectonline.com/2017/01/value-in-classroom-variety.html.

References

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Safe and Reliable Water Matters. (2017). Retrieved from https://thewaterproject.org/

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