Who knew it was different student-centered activities out there? You knew? And didn't tell me, I have been bamboozled. Well, better late then never, throughout this Reading. Language. Literacy course we came across three student-centered activities. Those student-centered activities are as follows: text rendering protocol,
chalk talk, and jigsaw activity. Just to recap what these activities are, the text rendering protocol is a group of three or more that goes in a circle sharing one sentence, one phrase, and one word. This process allowed me to see my classmates biggest takeaways from the chapter. Chalk talk, hey! I know what you are thinking, chalk cannot talk same thing I said the irony is hilarious. However, chalk talk is when you have a facilitator who circle words to indicate when a student needs to elaborate and the facilitator must connect ideas. The words/phrases were main ideas or things from the chapters we read. Shhhh! There is no talking during this activity, there you have it a contradiction of some sort. Jigsaw is such a creepy word I always think about the "saw" movies, but this activity breaks the class into groups, you have a home group and an expert group. There is a reading coordinated with your home group that you read individually then come together with your group and discuss the article. Once you have a better understanding then you collaborate with your expert group, educating one another on your home group article. To finish it all off your expert group must create a powerpoint displaying your common themes. Now, let us be realistic there are way more student-centered activities that are out there we have to just search long and hard for them. All of these activities were fun and unique in its own way. The way these activities pulled the material from the assigned chapters together, providing the class with a consensus of what it was about. With all of these activities it gave me insight into how each of my classmates thought and their process on reading and understanding the text.
With that being said I did some research on student-centered learning and I found this interesting article called "The courage To Learn Student-Centered Learning," by Shirley L. Baugher. In this article there was much talk about her experience with online teaching and how there was a engagement in developing tools to exercise student-centered learning. Who could of known that student-centered learning can also be referred to as the flipped classroom? Totally insane, am I right? Encouraging this kind of learning in the classroom shifts away from the teacher and focuses more on the student. Now that student-centered learning is further evolving and becoming apart of the classroom, lecturing is criticized. This can be understandable because sometimes lecturing is out right boring and should be a crime!!! Just kidding or am I? However, there are downsides to student-centered learning, which is the act of institutions and teachers claiming to be putting student-centered learning to use when really they are not. So, "check yourself before you wreck yourself," "OH YAHHHHH!" The students ability to learn is not solely relying on student-centered learning, they also rely on teacher-centered learning. Nothing is black and white I guess. Therefore, student-centered learning is available to help guide the class to develop a better, more fun way of understanding the content.
Throughout this course we have learned content that relates to different learning strategies and can connect back to this research article. The
main themes that were covered in the classroom and reoccurs throughout this
article are as follows: collaboration, student learning,
accountability, and participation. What is listed above is only a few main
themes that I have noticed while taking this course and as I did research.
There are plenty of more that can be listed, but I choose these four because
they are what best fits with this content.
Follow me into the wonderful world of collaboration, everybody say
it with me now “C O L L A B O R A T I O N!” That’s more like it. Back to what I
was saying collaboration is one of the main themes that ties this content all
together in a pretty little bow. In the
article Baugher explains what student-centered learning is about. Baugher (2013) states,
I propose that a more useful
presentation of student-centered learning
is on of collaborative learning… when she asked teachers to name conditions,
they identified trust, a shared vision, and communication as primary (1).
When student-centered learning is being displayed in a classroom
one must see the presence of collaboration. With that being said there must be
interaction between the students. In this class there were many opportunities
where we showcased collaboration. One demonstration would be the jigsaw
activity, we each read our assigned articles then came together to discuss our
take aways from our home group article, that way we were able to teach others in our
expert groups on what the article was about. Once we met with our expert groups we
collaborated to pick out key themes that were found in all of our articles and
constructed a powerpoint as our ending result.
In between these sentences Baugher starts to question what
collaboration actually means and what are the specific conditions. The primary
answers she received for her questions were the ability to trust one another, agreeing on the same themes or ideas, and communicating ones
thoughts. Well, if one of these three conditions are missing then the activity might be unsuccessful.
Student learning is huge, well, of course it is this is the main subject. Duhhh! There was always a new student-centered activity presented to us when we came to class. So, student learning was kind of a big deal. We all developed our ideas from one another, making sure to elaborate on our thoughts. For example, the chalk talk activity allowed the facilitator to circle the other students ideas that they wanted them to elaborate on. Although we were not allowed to talk it gave us a chance to actually read the words and absorb what it meant through our classmates thought process. At the end of this activity students had a better understanding of the material and grasped the main ideas in those chapter.
We needed to make sure that we read those assigned chapters before each class because there would be a student-learning activity. This reflects back to accountability since everyone needed to have those chapter read in order for the activity to run smoothly and efficiently. Everyone was responsible for themselves and was expected to have the reading done. In this article it states, "Increased responsibility and accountability on the part of the student" (4). Student-learning is a way to develop a students accountability skills to make sure the work gets completed.
Lastly, with student-centered activities it is expected that there is participation. In this course everyone participated, there was never a free for all which is noticed in teacher-centered learning. During teacher-centered learning students are calling out, not everyone has that chance to speak, or they do not feel comfortable. There was one activity that was not mentioned earlier and that activity was "save the last word for me." In that activity everyone had the opportunity to speak, we went around in a circle and no one could comment until the speaker was finished. This made everyone feel comfortable about speaking because "everyone is doing it." That was such a cliche thing for me to say, #sorrynotsorry. This activity showed an excellent representation of students jumping out of their comfort zones for the sake of learning.
https://youtu.be/vJUJbdiuOlQ
I am glad that I had the chance to share my experience with you and I hope that you too would find it easy to share your experiences. Come on, I know you want to and I am such a good listener I promise. We want to know how do you incorporate student-centered activities in the classroom whether you are a participant or a teacher. These student-centered activities were easy to navigate while dissecting rigorous course content. It helped me develop my thinking process by listening to my classmates thoughts and viewing different perspectives. The way we all interpreted the class content differently engaged me even further into the wonderful world of literacy.
Through these activities it allowed me to throughly understand the chapters and the content in its entirety. With student-centered activities there is a collaboration, student learning, accountability, and participation. So, you are basically learning while having fun, it does not get any better then that.
Have fun, come get you some... KNOWLEDGE!
That is all folks!
Reference:
Baugher, S. L. (2013). The courage to learn student-centered learning. Journal
of Family and Consumer Sciences, 105(2), 3.
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