By : Nurul Liyana Ab Jabar and Fatin Nadia Fadzil.a
Encouraging Students' Participation in Experiential Learning Classes.
Game is one way of promoting experiential learning among students. Roger, in his article Active Reviewing Tips for Dynamic Experiential Learning suggests seven strategies to encourage students' participation in the experiential learning class (ELC). However, here we will only discuss five of them which are investigating, facilitating, clarifying, demonstrating and changing.
Firstly, we have to investigate the level of participation among students in the ELC. Instead of asking them why they are not interested in the activity, we should find out the reasons why ourselves. This is to avoid the students from being uncomfortable and even more unwilling to get involved. It can be done by approaching them individually or have someone close to them to tell us the problems they encounter. Besides the problems, we should also investigate what kind of activity that will trigger their interest, thus encouraging them to participate. Secondly, we have to facilitate the students to contribute easily. This can be done by assigning task involving songs, news report or drama for them to carry it out independently. We can also give the students questions to answer and time to think besides using visual aids as an alternative for them to express their opinions.
Thirdly, we have to let the students clarify their expectations about the processes involved in the learning by sharing ideas about what they need and don't as well as the objectives of the tasks. This is for them to understand the goals they need to achieve by the end of the learning. Fourthly, it is important for us to demonstrate how the learning should take place. For more effective implementation, it will be better for them to demonstrate it themselves to encourage credible demonstration of how experience-based learning works. One of the most effective ways is by setting up a team of observers to watch the demonstration so that they can comment or share ideas involving the task carried out earlier. They can then swap the roles so that all of them can observe, see and learn a lot more.
Fifthly, we have to know when change the dynamics of the learning. We can reduce the number of students in a group to maximize communication among the group members since students tend to speak more in smaller group. The group should consist of like-minded people as they will feel close to people with similar opinions. At the same time, we should also be careful as the louder group members will sometimes dominate the discussion. Therefore, we have to encourage the quieter ones to participate more by doing appropriate gimmicks to avoid them feeling isolated in the groups' activity. We can also persuade them to give response for what they feel towards the gimmicks.
As a conclusion, there are five strategies in encouraging students' participation in experiential learning class which are investigating, facilitating, clarifying, demonstrating and changing. These are important as students' active involvement in carrying out the tasks will lead to a more meaningful learning, thus giving them the opportunities to express themselves by reflecting on their experiences.
Reference:
http://reviewing.co.uk/archives/art/3_2.htm#1
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