Roll Up Your Sleeves! The Message and Mess of Hands-on Learning
- Learning Step-by-step
- Evaluating the Dramatic Moment
- Come on, Join the Fun!
- Resources are Everywhere
Gaston Comeau
Gaston Comeau still remembers his first day teaching. A young heckler in the junior high compulsory French class Comeau was teaching was reprimanded by a classmate. "Hey!" said the other student. "Give this guy a chance!" Touched and inspired by this student's trust, Comeau provides all his students with every opportunity to improve their French communication skills. "My goal is to help build students' confidence in their bilingualism as they follow their dreams and become productive members of Canadian society."
Today's students may sit in rows to learn about a classic poem, but they also get out of their seats to create a dramatic interpretation of the poem. They build interactive websites, communicate with other students around the corner and around the world, work together to solve real-world math problems and get a lot of learning done.
This is experiential or hands-on learning. "Just about every curriculum outcome can be linked to a real-life experience!" declares Gaston Comeau. His large and colourful Grade 5 French immersion classroom at Bridgewater Elementary School in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, is usually buzzing with activity, as students re-write a book scene into a play, prepare a dish for class consumption based on a meal eaten by a book's character or create a PowerPoint presentation demonstrating a mathematical principle.
Making the link between the curriculum and life can improve the learning, too, points out Betty MacLure, who teaches at Wainwright Elementary School in Wainwright, Alberta. "At the Grade 2 level, students have difficulty moving from the concrete to the abstract," she explains. MacLure creates different manipulatives to help her young students bridge this gap.
Manipulatives are small objects that can be rearranged in many ways. For example, sorting objects into piles of 10 and 100 "clearly shows the difference between 125 and 215, and the fact that one is much larger than the other!" she explains. When purchased from an educational supply company, manipulatives can be quite expensive. MacLure is able to provide her class with ample supplies by using materials that are available to her.
For example, parents send in surplus materials such as buttons, bag ties, cards, dice and dominoes that the children can use as "counters." Other manipulatives (such as tangrams [ancient Chinese moving-piece puzzles, consisting of seven geometric shapes], money, fractions wedge-shaped pieces of various proportions that can be put together to make a whole], clocks and file folder games) MacLure makes herself out of materials such as bristol board, file folders and construction paper. She also photocopies blackline masters onto construction paper, laminates them and then cuts them out. "Laminating makes the manipulatives last longer," she explains. "Some, such as weekly vocabulary words, can be just photocopied onto ordinary paper for the students to cut out, used for the week and then put in a baggie to take home for further study."
"Hands-on learning does work well," agrees John Cordukes, a science teacher at Cobourg District Collegiate Institute West in Cobourg, Ontario, "because it makes the topic interesting and relevant to all the students, not just the high academic achievers." Getting students out of their seats and involved in experiential learning also fits well with the rest of Cordukes' educational philosophy. "I want to get kids excited about science, turned on about something in the natural world that they'd never noticed before."
Learning Step-by-step
John Cordukes
"As I look back on what I've tried to accomplish with kids, I hope that I have instilled in them an excitement and concern about nature and science. If students develop an interest, understanding and empathy for their environment, in its broadest terms, then they will be better equipped to deal with other important issues that will concern all of us in the future."
Set the Stage
Set the stage by preparing activities to meet specific goals or curriculum outcomes, says MacLure. She issues quick tests to her students every Friday to determine how they are progressing with the material covered that week. "I'll use the results of these tests to determine my outcomes and activities for the coming week," she says. When the entire class is struggling with a concept, she covers it again using a different approach, but when only a few students are having trouble, she designs individual work just for them.
Setting the stage can also mean preparing the students, says Comeau. "Create curiosity and interest by explaining the connection between real life, the learning activity and the abstract concepts involved." In other words, sell the lesson by creating interest and demand. Comeau spends time describing how solving a set of math story problems will teach students how to perform a certain mathematical operation (for example, finding a percentage). He then explains how understanding it will aid them in later life (when they want to know how much of their allowance they are spending on snacks in a month).
Get it Together
Once you have determined a specific outcome, decide how you are going to carry out the activity, says Cordukes. Take care of safety factors first. Then, "step back and figure out how much of the activity should be pre-determined by the teacher and how much should be handled by the students." Cordukes varies his class activities and lab exercises so that some have the students following clear step-by-step instructions and others require them to problem solve their way through it. "Varying the style keeps the students from getting frustrated." Do a run-through of the activity to make sure it works correctly, he adds.
Next, collect and organize the materials needed for the activity, recommends Comeau. "Make sure that you have enough material on hand that all students can participate and that the activity isn't going to be too expensive." If the style of the activity or the available resources mean that the students must work in teams, make sure that they have equal responsibilities. "If you have a do-er and a watcher, the do-er is the only one having the fun and doing the learning. The watcher is either upset or not concentrating," he cautions.
Keep it Moving
Moving around the classroom will allow you to quickly pick up who is doing and who is watching. This is an important element of any hands-on activity in a classroom, Comeau, Cordukes and MacLure agree. "The children can work fairly independently, especially once they're accustomed to working this way and working with each other," says MacLure, "but it's important to keep an eye on how things are going."
"I probe the students with questions while they're working," comments Comeau, "asking them what is happening, why is it happening that way, what will happen next. All this makes them think about what they are doing and reinforces the link between the concept and the real-life application." Without that link, they are just playing around, he says.
Keeping track of the students' work during a hands-on activity also allows the teacher to double-check that the activity has been correctly designed and explained to the students, adds Cordukes. If they are off on the wrong track or getting lost, it is best to catch it early before too much time has been wasted. "It's all right for the students to have difficulty - that's how they learn - but it's important to make sure that the resources they need are available when they go looking for them."
Look it Over
The last step in any hands-on activity is evaluating the students' work and what they have learned from it. MacLure's weekly tests evaluate the success of the previous five days' work and guide her plans for the following week's activities.
Comeau leads his students through a discussion summarizing what they did and what they learned. He also repeats and reinforces the link between the activity and the concept, to ensure that every student has made the connection.
Cordukes designs a marking scheme for each activity, clearly outlining the expectations for each part of the activity, such as execution, reporting and results.
(For information on evaluation in the hands-on world of drama, see "Evaluating the Dramatic Moment," below.)
Evaluating the Dramatic Moment
"In drama, success is independent of marks," comments Kim Lewis, drama teacher at John McGregor Secondary School in Chatham, Ontario. Yet evaluation is necessary for students to learn how others have interpreted their dramatic efforts and to improve their performances.
By videotaping class performances, and using peer assessment and rubrics taken from a variety of sources - including material from professional publishers and new teachers in the system, as well as rubrics she designed based on the expectations and outcomes listed in the curriculum documents - Lewis evaluates students' motivation and sincerity, looking for appropriate and successful choices: Was that the right movement for the exercise? Did you choose the best tone of voice for the passage? Did you communicate what you intended? What would have made your performance more successful?
When she does hand out marks, she adds, they are always accompanied by extensive comments.
"I want drama class to be fun, but that doesn't mean the students can fool around," stresses Lewis. "It's not an easy credit." After establishing trust and outlining the expectations for the class, Lewis pushes her students to explore their emotions, opinions and ways of expressing themselves.
They use these explorations to create several plays on social issues - for example, bullying - that they then present to schools in the area. Audiences are deeply affected by the productions, and teachers report changed behaviour, such as reduced incidents of bullying, as a result. "My kids know they've changed the world," says Lewis proudly. This is the true mark of success for her students.
Jack Trovato, who teaches drama at Alpha Secondary School in Burnaby, British Columbia, takes a different approach to dramatic evaluation. "Students deserve feedback and evaluation to provide them with a benchmark from which they can measure their own success," he says.
Every task and exercise in his drama classes is broken down into specific sub-categories. For example, 40 percent of a course grade is based on class participation: using class time effectively, discussing and sharing experiences openly, developing trust, teamwork and cooperation, actively engaging in exercises and activities, arriving on time, displaying concentration on the tasks at hand, respecting the rights, ideas and differences of others, and listening attentively and following instructions. Trovato clearly sets this out in the course syllabus he distributes at the beginning of the year.
"I'm using a carrot-and-stick approach," Trovato chuckles. "Using clear criteria simultaneously rewards students and brings them back on task when they get distracted."
Come on, Join the Fun!
Betty MacLure
"I love to teach. My students' humour and frankness is refreshing, and their feedback - lots of hugs and high fives - inspires me to try new and innovative methods that, in turn, make the students more receptive to learning. Watching them discover the world through play, without realizing that they are working, is very rewarding. The sense of accomplishment that students demonstrate when they finally master a difficult concept is gratifying. It is a wonderful and fun vocation!"
This all sounds like a lot of work. Is it worth it?
"Yes! Absolutely," affirms Cordukes. Teaching is more fun and the learning is more challenging for the students, he says, when there are hands-on activities involved. The teacher can roam through the class and take the time to actually help an individual student. And when hands-on work is properly balanced with individual seat work - in high school science, that is about a 50-50 split, Cordukes recommends - the student can achieve deep, effective learning that will help them succeed in the course and in their school career. ("In elementary classes, about 25 percent experiential learning is most effective," says Comeau.)
Comeau encourages any teacher to include hands-on activities in his or her teaching. "Start with an area of the curriculum that you are most comfortable with," he says, "and begin with a small, simple activity that allows the students to discover something for themselves." Also, ask open-ended questions and be prepared for different solutions and approaches to a problem, he recommends. Grouping students in pairs rather than teams lessens the initial confusion as students become accustomed to learning this way.
You do not have to do it alone or make it up all yourself, adds MacLure. Teachers can look for inspiration and resources in books, on the Internet, in professional development sessions and from other teachers (see "Resources are Everywhere," below). But hands-on learning has both pros and cons, Cordukes cautions. It takes more time and energy to devise a hands-on learning exercise than it does to develop a traditional lesson plan covering the same material. It takes time to carry it out and there is not a lot of extra time for activities in the high school curriculum.
"Hands-on learning can be messy and noisy," adds MacLure. Not only may there be bits of paper on the floor and glue on the desks, but students may also be moving around, occasionally arguing, asking more and less predictable questions and learning at their own pace (which is not necessarily the neat sequential order of a lesson plan). More conservative teachers do not understand the learning potential and benefits of hands-on activities, she continues, and therefore do not see the point of creating that kind of disruption in their classrooms.
Hands-on activities involve all sorts of unknowns for both student and teacher. "What do I do now, sir?" coupled with "How long should I let them struggle before I step in?" can make some teachers very uncomfortable.
Then why do it?
"Think about teaching instead of the curriculum," urges MacLure. Teaching is more than just getting through the material; it is about reaching the students, getting them excited about learning, making a difference in their lives and helping them grow into the kind of adults we know they can be, she emphasizes. With all that in mind, a noisy, busy, sometimes messy classroom becomes the mark of effective teaching and learning.
Resources are Everywhere
Hands-on learning projects do not have to be unique to each teacher. "That would just take too much time!" laughs Betty MacLure, a Grade 2 teacher at Wainwright Elementary School in Wainwright, Alberta. She turns to a variety of existing resources to develop hands-on learning projects for her students.
Children's books give plenty of ideas. For example, reading Grandfather Tang's Story by Ann Tompert aloud inspired her students to manipulate tangrams to create the different animals in the story. MacLure used the book Alexander Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday by Ray Cruz to encourage her students to work with coins to see how Alexander spent his money.
Many professional development activities demonstrate how to use manipulatives, MacLure adds. Kim Sutton (a mathematics consultant from California) uses pattern blocks to help students understand patterns, symmetry, shapes and estimation. A teacher can buy pattern blocks or photocopy, laminate and cut out the blackline masters provided in a booklet that accompanies Sutton's sessions. Nancy McDonald (an educational consultant with the Bureau of Education and Research in Washington state) uses manipulatives to teach reading. For example, letters of the alphabet can be printed on 1.5 x 7.5 cm cards, white for consonants, yellow for vowels and green for "y" because it can be both. Students make words with the cards by sounding out how the letters go together.
"There are many websites to use for resources," says MacLure. Links to Canada's SchoolNet, Global Schoolhouse, 2Learn, Kathy Schrock's resources and many others are available on MacLure's website.