http://www.rishivalley.org/
http://www.river-rv.org/contactus.html
http://river-rv.blogspot.com/
Showing posts with label ABL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ABL. Show all posts
Friday, July 15, 2011
Silent revolution - British council
What is PBL?
According to Wikipedia, Project based learning, or PBL, is a constructivist pedagogy that intends to bring about deep learning by allowing learners to use an inquiry based approach to engage with issues and questions that are rich, real and relevant to their lives. This strategy is well served since the onset of the read/write Web. Teachers have ready made content easily available via the Web and the tools to allow for creative student directed creation of content related to the problems and questions contained in the project being studied.
According to Wikipedia, Project based learning, or PBL, is a constructivist pedagogy that intends to bring about deep learning by allowing learners to use an inquiry based approach to engage with issues and questions that are rich, real and relevant to their lives. This strategy is well served since the onset of the read/write Web. Teachers have ready made content easily available via the Web and the tools to allow for creative student directed creation of content related to the problems and questions contained in the project being studied.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
ABL Report - Anandalakshi
ACTIVITY BASED LEARNING
A Report on an Innovative Method in Tamil Nadu
By S. Anandalakshmy Ph.D.
Assisted by the Bala Mandir team: Usha Ramakrishnan, Indu Balagopal, Lakshmi Gopal, Jaya Krishnaswami, Swatantra Saktivel, & Anne Panghat.
Preamble
This is year 2007. India is completing its sixty year cycle, since Independence. A time to reflect. A time to take a critical retrospective scan of the education of children in the country. A time to acknowledge that the country has failed to provide a satisfactory education to the millions of children, who look to the State with hope and anticipation. Dozens of studies have substantiated the failure of the system on the whole, even while there are some pockets of successful pedagogic efforts. Innovative methods which engage the children and enable them to achieve mastery over school- related competencies and skills can be located here and there. However, they are small in scale and number.
ABL - course
In Activity-Based Learning courses, students do public service, fieldwork, community-based research and internships in conjunction with in-class work. ABL pedagogy aims to enrich students’ academic experience and learning outcomes by connecting theory with practice, and concepts with methods, using data and insight they obtain through engagement with the larger world.
British council , Unicef - ABL in Tamil Nadu
Managing a Silent Revolution: Educational Change in Tamil Nadu from India British Council on Vimeo.
A ‘Silent Revolution' has taken place in south Indian primary schools. A vision of individualized, interactive learning was realised with the implementation of Activity Based Learning. The Tamil Nadu government managed this change and now together with British Council and Unicef, aims to give children relevant and quality exposure to English.
An overview, supported by a short video will show how teachers' attitudes and behaviours have changed and how the creation of an activity based environment was implemented in all government primary schools across this large state.
The talk will continue by describing how ‘Project English' managed by British Council together with Unicef have worked with the state government to develop and deliver a cascade teacher development programme for 120,000 teachers.
Finally the lessons learned from this collaborative project have been pulled together by all three partners to produce a ‘toolkit' of practical guidelines on how to ensure the smooth planning and implementation of large scale INSET projects in developing countries.
ABL - primary Class
wiki link
Analysing Activity Based Learning in Primary Classes
Overview
So far the concentration in overhauling of primary education, has been to make activity based teaching. The present project tries to analyse how much of this teaching results in activity based learning ,as far as the child/student is concerned.
Aims
The present project aims at finding out how much of learning has resulted from the activity based method of teaching in the different primary classes (class I to class V)
Objectives
Objective
|
Project Plan
Methodology
Observation of the different class teaching will be done for a month in each of the schools chalked out for the study. Initially we will work on Govt. schools, then go on to Public schools and then to the private schools The results of the observation will be tabulated . The teacher teaching the classes will be inte4rviewed to find out how she marks and evaluates the students. Observation of the achievement results will also help tally and correlate with the achievement results.
Milestones
- How much participation /interaction is present
- How Teacher recapitulates
- Evaluation Method
- Achievement results as indicator
- How useful this process could be
- How to improve/on what points
The process will take at least one year's time to get actual results.
What is ABL
Activity-based instruction involves...activities! This is in opposite of pure lectures. It means hands-on approaches to instruction, using manipulatives to engage multiple senses, as opposed to just listening to a lecture. For instance, I've used notecards in a lesson to teach complete subjects and predicates. On the notecards I wrote (from a prompt) complete subjects and complete predicates, separate from each other, and had the students find their match. As opposed to just listening to me tell them what the differences are, they see them, evaluate them, and synthesize them (reference 'ole Bloom's Taxonomy).
Activity-bases instruction revolves around students learning though hands-on activities. I think that this method can be great, especially for tactile learners. It breaks up the monotony of the basic teacher-led lecture/students listen and take notes system. Let's face it, not all students learn from listening to their teacher drone on for 50-90 minutes a day. Activity-based allows students to demonstrate an understanding of the material and, usually, work with a partner or group, which leads to socialization
I think, however, that this type instruction is better for a group of students who are highly motivated and goal oriented. If not, these activities can result in chaos, because many students consider this "goof off" time. They don't learn anything and they don't create any type of worthwhile product. I've seen this happen way too many times. Recently, I had my students demonstrate their understanding of Beowulf by creating an Anglo-Saxon newspaper. In this newspaper, they had to write an article summarizing the story of Beowulf. The rest was to focus on Anglo-Saxon events, etc. Instead of creating amazing projects, they wasted 90 mins. chatting about their weekends, and then wanted another day to complete the project. What they turned in was trash and demonstrated very little effort or knowledge. In that case, activity-based instruction was a waste of time.
Link
Activity-bases instruction revolves around students learning though hands-on activities. I think that this method can be great, especially for tactile learners. It breaks up the monotony of the basic teacher-led lecture/students listen and take notes system. Let's face it, not all students learn from listening to their teacher drone on for 50-90 minutes a day. Activity-based allows students to demonstrate an understanding of the material and, usually, work with a partner or group, which leads to socialization
I think, however, that this type instruction is better for a group of students who are highly motivated and goal oriented. If not, these activities can result in chaos, because many students consider this "goof off" time. They don't learn anything and they don't create any type of worthwhile product. I've seen this happen way too many times. Recently, I had my students demonstrate their understanding of Beowulf by creating an Anglo-Saxon newspaper. In this newspaper, they had to write an article summarizing the story of Beowulf. The rest was to focus on Anglo-Saxon events, etc. Instead of creating amazing projects, they wasted 90 mins. chatting about their weekends, and then wanted another day to complete the project. What they turned in was trash and demonstrated very little effort or knowledge. In that case, activity-based instruction was a waste of time.
Link
ABL - Merits and Demerits
Activity Based Instruction:
What does activity based instruction classroom look like? Well .. active! Here, the teacher is mostly that of a facilitator rather than of authority in knowledge. He engages the learners into tasks and makes abstract ideas into concrete ones. It is learning by doing rather than learning by listening It can be done in two ways – i) Student cantered instruction where students have freedom to choose a problem and formulate strategies to solve them and ii) Teacher cantered instruction where the teacher takes the lead role.
Advantages of Activity Based Instruction:
1) The most important feature of activity based instruction is learning by doing. So this method of instruction can fulfil the natural urge of a growing child on one hand also can help them learn their lesson.
2) The method also promotes better understanding of a lesson among students as they learn the lesson by practicing the task themselves.
3) It inspires the students to apply their creative ideas, knowledge and minds in solving problems as well as promoting competitive spirit among them.
4) It also helps learner psychologically as they can express their emotions through active participation in something useful.
5) The method also helps in developing their personalities, social traits and inter-personal management skills.
Disadvantages of Activity Based Instruction:
1) The activity based instruction method requires long-term planning with minute details of the whole process because before engaging the learners, the teacher has to make sure that all students have sufficient knowledge and skills regarding the task they are going to perform. So this method can not be used on a regular and daily basis as it involves a lengthy procedure.
2) The objectives of the method can only be fulfilled if the planning of the lesson is flawless. If there is slightest flaw in the planning, this method would do more harm than good.
3) Learners have varied levels of merit and understanding. So less meritorious students might not prepare for a task as other which might lead to failure of objectives of the whole process.
4) Many renowned educationists also are of the opinion that the activity based method is more suitable for branches of experimental sciences and less useful for subjects of social sciences.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)