Successful Learning Activities Are Vital For Effective Classroom Management.

The first criterion for is that they should have a clear focus.

When teachers plan classroom activities they need to be clear what the learning activity will enable the students to achieve. The aim of the activity may be to introduce new information, or to revise something students have already met, perhaps it's to develop students' ability to compare different things, or maybe it's to assess how well students have mastered a skill or aptitude.

The point is teachers should know exactly what the focus of the classroom learning activity is, and more importantly that they communicate this clearly to the students. When students know where they are going with their learning they perform better. Confusion is a big barrier to learning. When students know why they are learning what they learn it's even better, because the experience becomes more meaningful.

The rule of the '4 Ps' is useful in helping us stay clear about the focus of the learning activities we use. Whatever the subject or topic, successful learning activities have as their focus at least 2 of the 4 Ps:

• Presentation - information is presented to the learner - this may be in different forms and we may want the learner to actively seek out the information rather than receive it passively
• Practice - when learners have the information they need they have to understand it and 'work it' so that they internalise it - the more ways we can find to involve students imaginatively in this phase the better
• Performance - this is the crucial part of the learning process when learners have to prove to themselves and others that they 'know' what they set out to learn

And the fourth P, which should always be present, is:

• Purpose - sometimes forgotten when we plan learning activities but it's crucial to 'clinch the deal' with our learners - they need to know why they're learning what we ask them to learn - if the reason isn't strong enough our learners won't learn in the long run, although they may be happy to cooperate in individual activities for a while.

How do we achieve this in learning activities?

Presenting the information:

eg lecture, worksheet, textbook, posters, information trail, PowerPoint presentation, video, library search.... and many more

Practice:

eg repetition, questioning, worksheet exercises, discussion, drafts, experiments, making samples, role play, imaginative games.... to name but a few

Performance:

eg tests, examinations, assessments, final product, debate, newspaper, web page, essay, presentation to other students, presentation of material learned in a different form [eg if students have studied a text they may present the information in the form of a poster or a mindmap]....limited only by your imagination.

Purpose:

'it's the next step we need to take to understand....'

'it's useful to be able to compare.....'

'it's time to move up from using single words to using complete sentences' 'eg [Modern Foreign Languages]

'we need to develop other ways to think about this problem...'

'this is necessary if we're going to be able to give a balanced view of...'

Sometimes there are other more utilitarian purposes:

eg 'We need to memorise this for our test next week'

'We need to know this really well so we can perform it to the parents on the open day next week'

'It will save us a lot of time when we come to make our final product'

The second criterion for effective classroom activities is that they should have a clear structure

The structure of a classroom learning activity will depend on the specific activity and the purpose for doing it. However, all successful activities follow a common thread in their structure and form part of a clear framework for learning.

The learning activity starts with a list of the learning outcomes. The outcomes reflect different levels of thinking or 'cognitive activity'. Our aim as teachers is to help students move up these thinking levels, and operate at the highest order they can, depending on their overall ability and the stage of their development.

For me the real value of listing learning outcomes is that you can refer to them frequently as the lesson progresses and it gives feeedback to the students not just about about how well they're doing, but also about precisely what they have learned.

Some years ago a senior colleague once asked in a training workshop 'How do you know if a lesson has been successful? Even if you know, how do the students know?' He then went on to show us how he'd listed some very precise steps to show exactly what students had learned in a specific lesson, and how he'd proved to them what they had achieved in those very small steps. These were students of very limited ability who needed almost instant feedback on just about every step of the lesson in order to believe they'd made any progress at all. It was a 'lightbulb' moment for many of us and we changed our approach to planning the structure of learning activities.

Below is a screenshot of the learning outcomes for some classroom activities I used in a French class with a group of 11 year old students, all of below average ability.

The third criterion for successful learning acitivities is that they promote progressive levels of thinking

Many teachers use ideas from Bloom's Taxonomy of cognitive activity to help plan the structure of learning activities. The key ideas behind Bloom's Taxonomy is that learners can function at different levels of thinking, starting with basic low level activities, such as identifying facts and can they can aspire to much higher levels of thinking such as being able to analyse information, create original material and judge the value of information.

A typical list of outcomes for a successful learning activity would use words such as, identify, understand, repeat, write out, demonstrate, explain, analyse, compare, assess. So much, of course, depends on at what stage of learning students are, and their learning experiences, as well as their innate ability. Successful teachers do, nevertheless, persist in trying to lead learners of all kinds upwards, and we are not being fair to our students if we don't encourage them to raise their levels of thinking ability and if we dont' give them the opportunities to learn how to do so.

The fourth criterion for successful learning activities is that they become part of a coherent learning framework.

It's important not to see learning activities in isolation, because successful learning comes about as the result of the synergy between learning activities that combine into a coherent whole. No matter how good a learning activity in the classroom is, it will only be succesful if it helps students to move forward in an effective learning cycle.

Some powerful research studies seem to suggest that a specific sequence for learning activities allows students to perform better than when learning is not structured in this way. This particular approach has been popularised by Alistair Smith among others, although the ideas have their roots in studies into brain based learning, in other words how the human brain processes information and how we can harness that power to make learning more effective.

The first stage in the sequence is where students remind themselves of information they already know and think about how that information can help them access and understand new information that they're about to learn. We can help them see the 'big picture'. It's also in this stage that we can help students see what the next learning steps are and,importantly, why these steps are important. This is the concept of WIFFM [What's In It For Me]. This is a powerful human motivator - we want to know that the effort we put into learning something will have a 'return'. If we can clearly see this kind of return we're more prepared to do what it takes to get that return.In classroom learning activities, this 'big picture' might be to see how the topic we're studying fits into our overall knowledge, or how mastering this skill will enable students to perform at a higher level.

The second stage of this learning framework is putting the learning in front of the learners. It's sometimes done by telling the students what they need to know, but it's almost always more successful when we get students to be more active in their pursuit of the information. So some refer to this stage as the 'activate the learning' stage - when students find out the information they need by engaging in activities that combine different learning styles and therefore make learning more accessible.

The third stage is the 'show what you know' stage - in other words, students complete activities that allow them to demonstrate the progress of their learning so far. They may not be at the stage where they have fully mastered what they set out to learn but they do have the opportunity to gauge for themselves [and for the teacher] how far the've come. This is a very good way to get feedback on the extent of direct learning.

The fourth stage of the learning cycle is where students and teachers reflect on the progress made. This stage also gives the opportunity to consolidate what has been learned and correct any misconceptions or fill any gaps in the learning. Importantly, this stage also makes it possible to reflect on how students learned, which is just as important as what they learned, because students can transfer good learning strategies to other aspects of their learning.

If we get the learning activities right we're well on the way to classroom management success.





Return from Learning Activities to Effective Classroom Management


Return from Learning Activities to Classroom Management Success

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