Dynamic, digital teaching

DID YOU USED TO SIT IN CLASS FOR HOURS ON END, FORCING yourself to stay awake as the teacher droned on and on about a subject that hardly interested you?

Sitting still is not a natural activity for a growing child, who has the often maddening need to touch and move around and explore the world around him, to see how his interaction with the things around him affects this world. Consequently, forcing a whole class of kids to do sit still for a prolonged period leads to boredom and, often enough, to mischief–as generations of parents and teachers know only too well.

The old school classroom most of us have had to endure is, fortunately, changing, as educators examine the traditional way of classroom teaching and realize that it does not effectively fulfill the goal of education, which is to hone mental acuity and encourage young minds to probe, question and make discoveries on their own, applying their own brand of creativity in using skills that will apply in the world outside the classroom.

In greeting card terms, education means drawing out the best in a student, not stuffing data into his or her head. The teacher is thus the "midwife" of learning, the facilitator, the one who educes or draws out from the student, not the person who grants all knowledge.

Schools that use the traditional way of learning design their curricula based on the outline and content provided by the textbook for the grade level and subject area. In this setting, teachers and textbooks are the primary sources of information and knowledge. In most cases, students cannot even question "book knowledge".

In the 21st century school setting, teachers have many tools at their disposal beyond books, pen, paper and classroom facilities. There are computers and a myriad choice of software that can be used as tools for teaching, as well as electronica like digital cameras and recorders and the great pool of knowledge and resources we call the Internet.

Gigi Carunungan-Carlson, an alumna of the Saint Pedro Poveda College, is preaching the gospel of a teaching method that is like a "proactive learning hub where students are actively engaged in acitvities and dialogues on topics that are valued in the real world."

Carlson returned recently to her alma mater to share the lessons she learned in a two-week intensive workshop dubbed "Teaching Strategies for the 21st Century Classroom." Carlson, once a high school and middle-school teacher in the United States, has also authored a book, "Digital Media in the Classroom."

Her teaching method, modern as it is with the use of digital technology, software and computers, mirrors the methods used by the famous teacher Socrates in the agoras of ancient Greece.

Her method is to create an enviroment where students are given hands-on training using various teaching materials and tools and more interaction with their peers, teachers and representatives of the real world than the traditional, sit-down-shut-up-and-listen-to-the-lecture style of teaching permits.

Carlson’s classroom setting is a give-and-take discussion where students are encouraged to question the concepts taught so they may gain familiarity with the topic and its lessons–an approach that Socrates perfected in his time.

Socrates took his students for long walks and urged them to observe and interact with their surroundings so they would gain answers and insights that would be their replies to his questions. He encouraged debate and independent thinking, correlation and extrapolation using data gathered firsthand by his students because he believed in their creativity and ability to think out of the box.

In a like manner, Carlson’s classroom makes use of all the students’ senses and faculties: "Instead of sitting down and quietly listening to what the teacher has to say for hours, the students are actively engaged in hands-on activities as professionals (like) authors, designers, publishers, researchers, inventors, documentary movie makers, entrepreneurs. This is the active way of learning."

She has merged the use of common classroom materials like construction paper, crayons and rulers with the use of gadgets like digital cameras, camcorders, computers, scanners and printers.

Her aim is to train students in a given "profession," which will become the vehicle they use to express the concepts and knowledge they have learned through interaction, research and questioning rather than through rote memorization of book text alone.

She also believes in applying this teaching method to preschool children, saying that "even kindergarten students can write their own stories and publish their own books. This is a very effective environment to learn and enjoy reading and writing."

The classroom of the 21st century, Carlson says, expands the horizon for both teachers and students. "The teacher acts as an ‘educational media producer.’ Instead of lecturing and dictating what students need to know about a topic," she says, the teacher challenges her students to use advanced research methods, developing students’ analytical thinking skills by guiding them as they work on "problem-based projects" that are creative and interesting as well as challenging.

In the classroom setting Carlson has designed, "teachers provide opportunities for students to connect with members of the community and/or specialists in the industries that have something to do with their class topic."

She recommends this with a practical goal in mind: Children are the ultimate test of the practicality of the law of cause and effect because they need to know why they have to study their lessons and how learning these lessons will help them when they grow up. This connects the students to, rather than isolates them from, the world which they will inherit and inhabit.

It also provides a hands-on training area where students will develop and hone skills they will need when they take up their chosen roles in society.

Carlson’s method is not a new or radical approach to education; rather, she is updating the methodology used by Socrates and his star pupil, the famous philosopher Plato –although of course there were no computers or digital cameras in ancient Greece.

Improving on a non-traditional approach to teaching, Carlson’s methodology brings digital technology into play to tie the in-terdisciplinary and Socratic methods together into a workable and very customizable package.

"Knowledge is not static," she says. "Students will be taught to distill concepts from experiences and hands-on lessons."

Her method entails teaching students to be resourceful, for them to "use search engines as a means to find information (on the Internet) and use the video camera as a means to collect and document information".

Students are taught to "organize their thoughts and analyze patterns...using non-linear software" that enable them to make visual and audio-visual presentations and to illustrate the points they seek to make. The students are asked to "create endless hypotheses and defend these with evidence".

Carlson also advocates going the extra mile using digital technology: "(Students) will publish books created through desktop (computer) facilities" and then decorate their print-outs with old-fashioned crayon and colored marker designs that will add personal touches to their work."

Carlson’s students "make use of kinesthetic (body movement) activities to learn about cells, they will invent alternatives" to established lessons.

An integrated, interdisciplinary approach to learning, she adds, will show students who have an affinity for music and singing the mathematical patterns in the rhythm and melody of the music they love.

Carlson, like Socrates, gets right to the heart of the matter, the raison d’ etre, of education: All that can be learned in this world is correlated to everything else that can be learned. Because of this, an interactive approach to teaching is the best method because it mimics man and his environment, which interact and are inseparable.

As students learn under the method now termed "inter-disciplinary" to which Carlson has added the use of modern gadgetry, they "will discover more about themselves and what they can do to make this a better world for all."

In this classroom, as in the agoras of Greece millennia ago, students are not talked down to by the teacher. Instead, their intelligence is recognized and their minds and bodies are put to work, and appropriately challenged.

Students’ interest is caught and held and growth takes place and the best they have to offer is educed from–drawn out of–their already capable minds.

"I am introducing the use of digital media and creative activities as effective tools that can address various ways in which students learn," Carlson says, defining her teaching methods with the term "helical learning."

"Many teachers conceptually know about ‘multiple intelligences’ or multiple ways of learning," she says. "What I provide are activities they can use to address the intelligences of diverse learners"–students who perform better in an interdisciplinary teaching environment rather than a traditional one.

"New discoveries in the way the brain works provides schools with higher levels of applications of the personalized education philosophy," she concludes.