When professional educators combine their energies and reinforce the same deep learning, the stream of information is clearer for the student, the learning activities are more fluid, and the student's reservoir of knowledge and skill fills faster.
Education,
now days, doesn't meet the deeper learning needs of students. Fortunately, it
can be accelerated by consolidating teacher efforts and combining relevant
contents. Cross-Curricular Teaching implies that students will follow a
particular stream of inquiry to the headwaters, rather than simply sampling all
the possible streams.
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Educators
need to understand and accept a few requirements:
1. Deep learning engages the whole student
(and teacher), heart, mind, body,
and soul.
2. It requires enthusiastic partners
within students, parents, and community.
3. It requires intensive preparation. As
the rapid development of society, teachers need to update their knowledge and
way of teaching students.
4. Assessment must mirror learning. Teachers
should evaluate students reflecting mastery of learning objectives rather than
mere assignment completion.
5. Collaboration is necessary. Students
must be taught how to collaboratively gain knowledge and skills in order to be
expert learners and demonstrate their learning by applying and creating.
In order
for all this to happen in a sustainable way in our schools, deeper learning
requires that groups of teachers pool their talents, resources, time, and
efforts to maximize coherence, relevance, and connections among the content
areas.
Teachers
should work with other grade level teachers and find common topics to prepare
to teach subjects jointly rather than separately. Teachers must start
collaboration with another teacher from a different department. The task of all
educator teams is to provide a rich, rigorous, and relevant flow of knowledge
and skills, and then find a way to lead the students to this water and then
make them thirsty enough to drink deeply. Students and teacher teams focusing
on learning deeply have the force to achieve learning beyond the traditional
education dam and shoot out over the spillway to not only understand the
torrent of available knowledge, but to also add to it in phenomenal ways.
The Blooms
Taxonomy meant that the first step would be to seek knowledge, comprehend it,
apply it in real life scenarios, analyze and further synthesize with other
concepts and subjects. With Phenomenon
Based Learning, this linear progression turns into a roller coaster ride,
which has become a challenge for teachers and students.
The learner
starts with a phenomenon or a real life scenario, analyses the linkages with
different concepts and subjects, identifies the gaps in knowledge and
understanding, seeks out that knowledge, comprehends it for each subject area
and then synthesizes it. So essentially what was a process of construction has
now been broken into deconstruction and then construction. First deconstruct
the phenomenon into different concepts and processes, understand them and then
reconstruct them into the original phenomenon and probably draw parallels with
other phenomenon.
This
educational methodology is more student-centered because they will do it in his
or her own manner, the number of linkages and the pathway chosen will depend on
their prior knowledge. Educators can use a number of resources and online
platforms to engage their learners in a discussion on what subjects and
concepts need to be learnt so that the phenomenon can be understood.
Phenomenon Based
Learning is an opportunity to integrate the best of learner centrist approaches and
it is the way forward as it is closer to how learning happens in real life, an
unexplained phenomenon starts off an inquiry, becomes a lifelong pursuit and
results in new knowledge and understanding. Phenomenon-based structure in a
curriculum also actively creates better opportunities for integrating different
subjects and themes as well as the systematic use of pedagogically meaningful
methods, such as inquiry learning, problem-based learning, project learning and
portfolios. The phenomenon-based approach implements a versatile utilization of
different learning environments.
As an
educator, I believe that a holistic real-world phenomenon provides the starting
point for learning. Breaking down the dominance of traditional subjects and
isolation of teaching is an opportunity to more fundamental change in schools.
Integrated knowledge and skills about real world issues enhances teacher
collaboration in schools and makes learning more meaningful to students.
Schools
should teach what young people need in their lives rather than try to bring
national test scores back to where they were.
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