How can we teach students skills they can apply beyond the classroom?

As educators, we have a daily challenge to ensure that our lessons effectively teach students skills that they will be able to transfer outside of the classroom. These skills include collaboration, organisation, self-organisation, critical thinking and reflection and can shape how students make decisions in the various stages of their life cycle. 

To what extent have we integrated this into our unit plans, in our curriculum, and what kind of skills can we build and develop in our teaching methods within humanities subjects?

Active learning is a technique used to foster students' autonomy and participation in the learning process. It gives them a role of leadership and positions the teacher as more than a just giver of knowledge – the teacher becomes the catalyst or the guide of the learning process.

Research has shown the benefits of active learning. Deslauriers and colleagues note that "students learn more when they are actively engaged in a classroom than they do in a passive lecture environment." They recommend that teachers foster student motivation and engagement by explicitly putting emphasis on the value of increased cognitive efforts connected to active learning.

Allowing students to carry out activities independently incentivises them to engage actively in their learning and leads to a deeper learning experience. Using strategic methods in active learning enables students to explore new avenues of inquiry or realise their misconceptions in a way not possible with passive lectures.

This suggests that, as educators, we have the capacity to influence the way students think, and build or even shape the cognitive abilities that define who the students are beyond the classroom.

This is especially true in the humanities, as we teach subjects that investigate and analyse systems, policies and governance on a local, national and international scale.

 

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Other articles you might be interested in:

* From the same author: How to help students 'raise their voice' on global issues

* Commentary: How I learned to teach and assess skills

* Educator in practice: The need for 21st century (survival) skills

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With my students, I planned a simulation of the European Parliament in collaboration with the local office of the European Union.

This is a class of students equivalent to year 10/11 in the British curriculum and year 9/10 in the US curriculum

Each student had a role, for example: representing the European association of bees; representing the agricultural chemical European committee representing five different countries; representing five political parties. We also had students taking the roles of lobbyists and representatives of the European Council.

The activity was articulated over three phases with predefined timeframes.

In the first phase, students understood their roles, negotiated their position and strategy in their teams, and had a fixed amount of time to discuss with each participant to gather information on the country, the role, the committees and the amendments they had to pass or block.

This was followed by a negotiation phase, where students had tokens to exchange to document the negotiation deals they had made. In the final stage, votes were passed based on the negotiations to pass or block the amendments and by extension determine the winning team –  the team who managed to pass their amendment and get opposing committees to adopt their position.

Participating in this activity allowed students to develop their negotiation skills, as they had to negotiate terms, agreements and partnerships based on the amendment they wanted to pass. They also developed transferrable skills, as they needed to use the theory they learnt on governance in class and apply it to the given task. Students also built their teamwork skills as they were required to work with multiple teams while deciding the best course of action to realise their goal to pass or block the amendment in question.

This activity also led to students being more environmentally aware, as they participated in a European campaign supporting sustainability, and each student was given an envelope of seeds to plant. Students enthusiastically participated in planting the seeds and also got their families involved, building their collaboration, affective and self-management skills.

Allowing students to be part of decision-making activities, whether as a team or with expert guests, will build their capacity to make decisions that can shape a community and have an impact both on a national and international scale. Given the evolution of the labour market, a world now defined by virtual meetings requiring highly-developed communication skills, the classroom needs to prepare students to function within an ever-changing world. The world of today requires being multi-skilled in several domains and able to quickly transfer skills to work on tasks at both a local and global scale.

Opportunities exist to rethink the way we build our unit plans and frame our classes to extend the capacity of students to enter the world of work after their studies.

What tools and strategies have you been adopting in your lessons to build your students' decision-making skills beyond the classroom?

Study shows that students learn more when taking part in classrooms that employ active-learning strategies – Harvard Gazette

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. 1991 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, The George Washington University, One Dupont Circle, Suite 630, Washington, DC 20036–1183.

 

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