Ronah Fe Nisperos

Put students at the center of the classroom with active learning strategies — a teaching technique that increases student engagement in daily lessons. With the goal of teaching mindful learners who actively pursue knowledge, teachers become more actively engaged in how they teach the curriculum and how they develop each student’s learning potential. They mix and match a variety of … tactics to ensure that students not only learn more, better, and faster -- they also learn smarter .Classroom gamification is an effective way to take a child’s love for play and turn it into a love of learning. The benefits are huge: gamification can help students focus and build essential skills. In order to effectively use gamification techniques in your classroom, start with your students: What do they like? Where are their learning needs? Are there any notable behaviour issues? Students have to take an active role in their own learning, but are often disengaged from the learning process. Project-based learning allows students to be fully immersed in an authentic and nuanced problem that has real-life implications. Project-based learning is open-ended, and allows students engaged in group work to find their own way to the solution. It doesn’t look the same in every classroom -- class size, student ability and learning styles play a large role in shaping the process.

While proponents point to increased engagement, knowledge retention and improved critical thinking, there are also significant criticisms: Project-based learning can be too focused on product creation instead of learning, and assessment is often subjective. Every classroom has a wide range of levels and learning styles, which can be difficult for any teacher to effectively address. Use experiential learning activities to counter student disengagement and get them involved in the learning process.

It can be difficult, however, to bring it to the classroom -- students might have different proficiency levels or be hesitant about teaching their peers, and it can lead to confidentiality issues about which students are struggling.

Some best practices for peer teaching include:

Explaining to students how to give feedback
Providing written prompts to guide discussion
Running classwide peer editing sessions
Problem-based learning is a student-centred pedagogy that puts students in groups to solve open-ended problems together. This teaching strategy has its advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

Develop long-term knowledge retention
Use diverse instruction types
Students are continuously engaged
Develop transferable skills
Improve teamwork skills
Disadvantages

Potentially poor test results
Student unpreparedness
Teacher unpreparedness
Assessment is time-consuming
Might not be relevant/applicable