LEARNING EXPERIENCES PROMOTES REAL LEARNING

CREATING LEARNING EXPERIENCES IN CLASS.

Authentic learning is real life learning. It is a style of learning that encourages students to create a tangible, useful product to be shared with their world. Once an educator provides a motivational challenge, they nurture and provide the necessary criteria, planning, timelines, resources and support to accommodate student success. The teacher becomes a guide on the side or an event manager, a facilitator not a dictator. Processes become the predominant force and the content collected is organized appropriately into portfolios.

Instead of vicariously discussing topics and regurgitating information in a traditional industrial age modality, authentic learning provides a learner with support to achieve a tangible, useful product worth sharing with their community and their world.

So in order for real learning to take place learners need to go through experiences to enhance it.

As teacher I have tried to create learning experiences in my classes by;

Encouraging collaboration among students, this I have seen it produce positive results. The learner when I give them tasks and in groups encourage them to collaborate the work is always done in time.

 Encouraging students to be innovative, this helps them to be creative and makes them creators.

I always set tasks that encourage creative thinking rather than just cramming.

To promote authentic learning experiences, as a Physics teacher I try in my lessons to always relate the Physics concepts to the real daily life situations.

By inspiring, mentaling them to be self-reliant rather than just looking at the teacher as the sole sources of knowledge.

Apart from imparting knowledge and skills, teachers also help children to define who they are. From daily interactions with teachers, children learn whether they are important or insignificant, bright or slow, liked or disliked. Teachers transmit these messages by the way they speak to children, their facial expressions and gestures, and by the amount of time they devote to each individual learner. Often teachers point out students’ deficiencies more than praising them for their efforts and (small) improvements.

To be successful as a teacher, I must attend to what students do, what they say and how they perform. Teachers should observe children’s reactions in class to find out whether they are ‘getting across’ to them. Thus, teaching is not a matter of reading from a textbook, or dictating notes, but a participatory process. Teachers rely on a variety of ‘signals’ from their students. ‘Eyes on’ behavior means students are paying attention. Squirming behavior means they are tired or bored. Affirmative nods of the head mean they follow and understand; puzzled looks mean they are confused……

Such characteristics of quality teachers almost always have to do with a teacher’s ability to relate to students as individuals in a positive way, treating them with respect, making lessons interesting and varied, providing encouragement and telling them to believe in themselves and their own abilities. This means that positive teacher-student relations and classroom climate must be important factors influencing how children experience school. 

How I immediately create authentic learning Experiences in my classes. 

• I give them tasks that require them to relate the physics concepts to their daily life experiences.
• I give them hands on tasks where they always carry out an experiment on their own and after they answer some questions depending on what they have observed in the experiment.
• I encourage the students to verbalize their knowledge and thinking.
• I give them opportunity to reflect on their learning. 
• I give tasks and encourage them to collaborate to construct the solutions.