INNOVATIVE TEACHING AND LEARNING.

Innovation teaching is a fundamentally different way of teaching which results in considerably better citizens that are able to competent in the 21^st century. For they will have achieved the skills necessary to meet the challenges of the century. These skills include;

1. Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
2. Communication
3. Collaboration

4.    Creativity and Innovation

I feel as a teacher today that the purpose of education is not just making a student literate but adds rationale thinking, knowledgeability and self-sufficiency.

Innovative teaching is necessary for the present and future of education to help students to reach their full potential. We should ask ourselves as teachers whether our methods of teaching is helping  the students to gain new insights or opened up new channels of intellectual stimulation or enhanced student’s essential and creative thinking power?. Innovative teaching is a necessity for all teachers in order to meet the educational needs of the new generations.

So every teacher should have strategies and create an environment that will foster students’ love of learning.

The innovative strategies   should do the empower students to think critically, access and analyze information, creatively problem solve, work collaboratively, and communicate with clarity and impact.

1.      Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom. with activities focused on their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study process, set goals, and monitor their own learning process.

2.      Learning is a social practice and can’t happen alone.

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When students work together on project teams, they learn to collaborate, communicate, and resolve conflicts. Cooperative learning and character development supports the social and emotional development of students and prepares them for success in the modern workplace.

3.      Emotions are an integral part of learning. Students understand ideas better when there’s interplay between emotions, motivation and cognition, so positive beliefs about oneself are a core part of reaching a more profound understanding.

 Similarly, keeping students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it matters, learning becomes more important to them.

4.      Learners are different and innovative learning environments reflect the various experiences and prior knowledge that each student brings to class. As teachers we need to apply practices that engage every learner.

5.      Students need to be stretched, but not too much. “It’s really critical to find that student’s sweet spot,” Teachers should try to prevent both coasting and overloading. Students need to experience both academic success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this as students at different levels help one another.

6.      Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Assessments are important, but only to gauge how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning environment itself. So assessment should be comprehensive.

7.      Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out into the real world. Learning can’t be meaningful if students don’t understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for the ability to transfer skills and adapt. “We can’t just have things remain in silos that never interact,”

 I plan to change my way of teaching by making it more innovative in a number of ways which include;

·  involving students and teachers in significantly different ways that lead to increased student learning and engagement

·  defining new outcomes for learning and designing new ways of measuring students’ progress and mastery

· creating new ways of facilitating learning and designing different structures for deploying adults in schools

· moving from a “one-size-fits-all” instructional program to personalized learning

focusing on the 21st-century skills of collaboration, teamwork, problem-formulation, creativity and the ability to "learn how to learn"

·  creating systems where students are partners in designing and owning their learning. Learner -centered lessons.

·  ensuring that a student can learn anywhere he/she can access the instructional material and at any time 24 hours a day/7 days a week and 365 days a year

·  creating a system of support for each student to be successful in this environment 

·    Project -  based learning.

Long term and student centered, project learning is a rigorous hands-on approach to learning core subject matter and basic skills with meaningful activities that examine complex, real-world issues. Project learning helps students develop and retain useful, working knowledge of subjects that are often taught in isolation and abstraction.

“You may be proficient, but without adaptive expertise you can get stuck very quickly as the world shifts.”