TEACHING AND LEARNING STRATEGIES FOR THINKING CLASSROOM

In the last class Mina proposed us to create a teaching sequence introducing some of the strategies that can be used in classroom. There are lot of strategies that can be useful in order to make a good and effective class. If we use some strategies in class, we will help children to develop their thinking, to obtain better results, to build their knowledge, to teach them how to organize their work, etc. Some examples of those strategies to work with are: anticipation, building knowledge, consolidation, brainstorming, paired reading and summarizing, etc.

My group was composed by: Pablo, Isabel, Laura, Sara Sánchez and Raúl. We decided to work with brainstorming strategy and we made a science teaching sequence. This strategy consists in generating many ideas about a topic so first students have to look for in their previous knowledge, open their minds and select what ideas are correct and what are not. This strategy can be done by individuals, groups or even the whole class; we work with the three of them. In our group we decided to talk about the topic of ‘energy expenditure’ so we first explained students what a brainstorming is and then we started with the activities. In the first activity children had to discuss with the teacher in which things they save energy, meanwhile the teacher wrote all their answers on the blackboard. In the second activity we divided the class in three groups and we gave one topic to each group (light, paper and water). Each one had to write on a paper one idea to save something related with the topic they had. They had to share in common their ideas of the same group in order not to put the same idea in two papers. Finally in the last activity they had to play a game called ‘Taboo’. Each member of the groups had to explain the idea he or she had written to the rest of the people from the other groups. The difficulty was that they can’t use the words they had written and neither could use mime. At the end of the lesson we asked children what they had learned, why was it important, what they were going to do now that they have a better knowledge, etc. With all these activities all the students have more specific ideas to save water, paper and light and they work brainstorming strategy.

In order to obtain an active learning there should be three phases on each lesson. The first phase is anticipation in which students are asked to answer questions related with the topic they are going to study. With this we can know their previous knowledge and focus their attention on the topic we want to work with. The second phase is building knowledge in which students have to answer their previous questions, propose new ones and also answer them, find out new knowledge and make sense of their thinking. This phase serves to revise what children are learning, identify the main points of the topic and let students to make their personal connections between all the knowledge and information they have. The last phase is consolidation in which teachers want students to reflect on what they have learned, ask what it means to them, the sense of them and what changes have occurred on their process of thinking and learning. The sense of this phase is to summarize the main ideas, make them more specific, share opinions, make personal responses and ask additional questions in order to expand knowledge.

I think these three phases are very important in lessons because without one of them the whole process of learning is not finished so the results are not optimal. At school and high school I have no used to work through the three phases but at university I do. I have realized that I learned more if I start from my previous knowledge, I improve it and learn new one and at the end I summarize what I have learned. Almost all my university teachers told us to analyze our process of learning in blogs, wikis, activities… and this is very useful.