Walter Geerts & René van Kralingen - The Teachers' Handbook

1  How do students learn?

to master something that seemed difficult at first. Conversely, it can be disheart ening to fail at something new. A judoka won’t stand a chance if she has to com pete in a level which is out of her range. To keep students motivated and to allow the learning process to take place, they need to be prevented from facing such a situation. In your own teaching practice, motivating the student in different ways can reinforce your own enjoyment of teaching and give you confidence in your own abilities. This means that the teaching method doesn’t dictate the process, but provides support. In addition, it implies that you would sometimes have to create smaller intermediate tasks for your students first in order to prepare them for the larger task at hand. As a teacher, you can incorporate the basic competence skills into your lessons by bringing transparency into your lessons and by motivating your students in a variety of ways. ■■ Analyse the thinking process : Not only should you know what your students should be learning, you should also be aware of potential obstacles in their learning process. What difficulties is the student likely to encounter?This can be tricky to gauge as you, as a teacher, have already mastered the curriculum. You’ll need to make a conscious analysis of the learning content. Once you know where the hurdles in the learning process are, you’ll be able to guide the student appropriately. Make sure you keep verifying at what stage of the process he is working. ■■ Have the students explain things to each other : A student needs an insight into his own learning process. You as the teacher will have to help him with that. One way to achieve that is to ask a student to explain something to one or more classmates. A study by Sousa (2001) about the effectiveness of a stu dent’s learning process demonstrated that teaching others is the best way to Making the learning process transparent To make the students’ learning process transparent, you could:

learn. One important conclusion was the fact that this effect depends on the way in which information is processed: students learn more when they actively engage with the content. Sousa claims that students only remember 10% of what they read and 95% of what they explain to others. Some may justifiably doubt the valid ity of Sousa’s findings. However, as authors we give credence to the ancient Chinese saying:

According to Sousa we remember: ■■ 10 percent of what we read; ■■ 20 percent of what we hear; ■■ 30 percent of what we see; ■■ 50 percent of what we see and hear; ■■ 70 percent of what has been dis cussed; ■■ 80 percent of what we have person ally experienced; ■■ 95 percent of what we explain to others.

I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.

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