Reflections on ICT Week 3 16th August 2007

K: What I already KNOW about this week’s topic

I had very little knowledge about this week's topic as I was not familiar at all with lesson planning because I did not have much chance to join in the lesson planning during ESE. However I had some impression of student-centred learning from the past few weeks of ICT lessons. SCLA gave me the impression of concentrating on the learning of the student as compared with the old style of teaching by rote and focusing more on the role of the teacher. In SCLA, the teacher acts more like a facilitator trying to build some structure around the discussion and lead it in the right direction rather than spoon-feeding all the information to the students.

W: What I WANT to learn

I wanted to learn more about SCLA and the ways and approaches that the teacher can go about student-centred learning as opposed to just talking and talking in front of the class for hours on end.

L: What I LEARNED this week

I learned some different approaches to SCLA, namely problem based, project based, case based, inquiry based, game based and resource based learning. My group focused on resource-based learning and it is more or less like giving the students tools to find out information by themselves. The teachers act as facilitators and give the students a few sources of information about a certain topic and the students are supposed to go and find out more sources of information by themselves. The teachers' role then are to give a scaffold to the entire task, like how the task is going to be graded and some questions to guide them along the task. However, the onus is still based on the students to find out as much information as they can by themselves and present it back to the class. In this way, they can introduce the topic to the class first before the teacher starts the teaching proper.

Q: What QUESTIONS I still have

How effective is student-centred learning as opposed to the traditional teaching approaches? I feel that not all subjects can use SCLA all of the time, as it is extremely time-consuming and taxing on both the teachers and the students. Some SCLA is necessary to provide some variety and novelty to the class, but over-use of student-based learning projects can be very exhausting to both the teacher and the students as they can be difficult for the teachers to access and the students might be initially overwhelmed by the sheer workload.