: Susan Edwards
: Active Learning in the Middle Grades Classroom
: Association for Middle Level Education
: 9781560902867
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Pädagogik
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Involve students and they learn. Learning activities that require students to discuss, question, clarify, and apply, help them retain the content we want them to remember. Active Learning approaches-intellectual activity, social activity, and physical activity-help students learn how to ask meaningful questions and become empowered to be lifelong learners. This book lays a foundation for teachers interested in using active learning by -Sharing the framework and rationale for active learning -Providing specific classroom strategies for use in any middle grades classroom. -Helping you overcome barriers to implementing active learning. -Describing the research that supports active learning for 10- to 15-year-olds.
Chapter 2
Intellectually Active Instructional Strategies
Nothing saddens me as much as witnessing brilliant young intellects addressing enormous efforts to trivial problems.
~Solomon Snyder
What do we mean by intellectually active? More than simply memorizing and regurgitating information, intellectually active students must be thinking at a higher level. Because the information available to us as a society is growing exponentially, it is increasingly important that students have a conceptual understanding of the content they are learning so they can sort, categorize, and prioritize that information. Learning endless facts is less important than understanding the ideas behind those facts. And it is not how much they know, but rather what they can do with that knowledge that matters. It is critical for students to be able to learn on their own and to apply that knowledge in new ways to solve new problems (Wagner, 2012). Brain research shows that when students are faced with unknown problems, their brains attempt to find connections to make sense of the problem. “The more complex the problem, the more complex the brain activity becomes” (Fogarty, 2009, p. 154), and this is when real learning occurs. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a framework that helps us think about this idea.
Bloom’s Taxonomy
Benjamin Bloom created a framework in 1956 to represent levels of thinking. These six levels of mental skills or abilities were revised in 2001 by Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl (seeFigure 4).
Remember—On this lowest level on Bloom’s Taxonomy, students memorize and recall informa