Prime
Time to implement skills-driven learning
Students of Trinity College, Nabbingo sit for their physics examination. FILE PHOTO
What you need to know:
- In the past, schools were designed to produce a workforce for the 19th Century market demands mainly the secondary sector and the developing tertiary industry in the country.
- It is now time to enforce skills and understanding of the requirements of the 21st century such as collaboration and critical thinking that encourages creativity, writes Jonathan Maserejje.
The endless bickering about the quality of young graduates entering the employment market is quite frankly the ultimate gauge of teaching and learning in our schools. Learners expect to acquire new knowledge and skills through quality teaching that could involve a structured sequence, often beginning with modelling, demonstration or illustration by the teacher. Promoting more skills learning than content retention is key to refining the quality of education.
Is seating our children in rows while they are stuffed with facts to which they have to regurgitate in exams a valid system of education in the 21st Century? Studying current global labour trends, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible; creative, critically thoughtful and socially skilled. So why are we teaching children to behave like machines?
The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a method of teaching whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. With an alumni of some of South Africa’s foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople, Woodmead integrated studies programme such as the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students’ explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or oceans which kept students enthused about learning hence keeping them engaged. While I find such a system too radical for our students, I still maintain that we need to up our teaching and learning styles to limit cramming.
Learners need equal chance
In the current Ugandan curriculum, our students have limited, if any, opportunities to practice team work skills which are essential in the corporate market. As adults, we succeed through teamwork or collaboration although most of us have probably learned these skills on the job. Authorities have stressed the need for creative and skills-developing education to create a more resourceful workforce to drive the country’s economy but why then is the curriculum and exams so narrow that they alienate learners whose mind does not work in a particular way?
Why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling style of micromanagement from UNEB through the outdated forms of assessments? Knowing that there has been minimal assessment reforms since the colonial handover to the East African Examination Council, the rudimentary system has stagnated teaching styles as teachers continue to simply teach for exams.
Room for exploration
There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common; they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with support rather than indoctrination or simply dictating notes at them. While a few affluent schools have embraced technology to enhance learning, affordable, schools can also explore outdoor learning across the curriculum to engage students more and develop their mental and physical capabilities while they also relate their in-classroom knowledge to the real world. It is not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a youngster enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, creativity, and allow them to discover ways crafts that reflect their character and skills.
There are plenty of engaging teaching programmes designed to work with students, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert is an education approach that uses imaginary contexts to generate purposeful and engaging activities for learning. Within the fiction the students are cast as a team of experts working for a client on a commission. It encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task – such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster – that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn or Q2L, is based on the way students teach themselves to solve problems. Complex tasks are given, they need to acquire and practice plenty of information and skills respectively to be successful at a given task.
The pyramid
According to the Learning Pyramid, researched and created by the National Training Laboratories in Betel, Maine USA, active participation in the learning process results into the highest levels of learning retention. As such only 5 per cent of learning is retained through lecturing, 10 per cent through reading, 15 per cent is retained from visual arts, 30 per cent from demonstrations, the 50 per cent of what learners learn is retained though small groups work/ discussions, 75 per cent is retained through experimental work and lastly 90 per cent of what learners learn though peer tutoring is retained. It is factual that the more collaborative learning promotes a wider range of skills among learners. It is, therefore, acceptable to ask some questions.
Jonathan Maserejje is the director of Faculty Harris Academy, London UK and Senior Consultant at Elimisha Education
@maseyjay, [email protected]
