What Are The Importance Of Activity Based Learning?

As the worldview towards teaching and learning methods continues to evolve, the traditional chalk-and-talk patterns have become obsolete. Instead, activity-based learning has emerged as a method that leading educationists are feeling optimistic about.

In this learning model, your kids are constantly involved in the on-goings inside the classroom via various activities that cater to their comprehensive growth. Suffice it to say, the importance of activity-based learning is manifold. For instance, taking part in day-to-day activities will help the cognitive and educational growth of your little ones.

Furthermore, as schools promote the notion of community learning, your kids will also learn the importance of group activities. Moreover, such actions will lead to the young ones receiving positive reinforcement from their peers and teachers – something which is crucial in building their self-dependency.

On a broader scale, activity-based learning can be categorised into three different types: exploration, experimentation, and expression. Note that the leading schools ensure to integrate these concepts when creating a syllabus or following a structured curriculum. This way, your kids do not learn by passive hearing but by real-life experience gathered from active participation.

How Can Activity-Based Learning Help Students?

In the era of smart classes and virtual conferencing platforms, the approach toward knowledge acquisition has been revolutionised in recent times. Consequently, educationalists are encouraged to teach practical applications to students rather than only theoretical guidelines. Activity-based learning, in this regard, can be a crucial factor.

In simple terms, in this learning model, your kids learn things by doing several lesson-related tasks and not just taking notes of what the teacher says. In this far more hands-on approach, the teachers have the opportunity to pay attention to individual students by analysing how the kids perform in a guided environment. As a result, they can integrate a customised and personalised teaching method which will be beneficial in developing your kids’ talents and overcoming obstacles they might face.

Leading thinkers and academics have severely criticised traditional evaluation methods in age-old learning modules for promoting memory-based rote learning. Such an approach, quite naturally, can lead to a gap in proper internalisation of the knowledge and skill sets that can hamper the development of your kids down the line. Interestingly, activity-based learning makes the pupil understand the working principles of the topics they are learning inside a classroom. Consequently, they learn to analyse the given data and form hypothetical scenarios that improve their problem-solving skills.

Another importance of activity-based learning is how it can ease the young minds in the school ground environment. Especially when it comes to younger children who have just enrolled, it can be a tricky job to make them feel at home in this drastically different atmosphere. Your kids lack the adult supervision that they have been habituated to within the home space. Additionally, the rules and regulations they have to follow can seem to be uncharted territory.

This can lead to your kids feeling left out and lonely in the classroom, feeling alienated from the rest. Activity-based learning, thus, is crucial in ensuring such shy students are indulged in classroom events. This way, they feel part of a community and enjoy the resulting validation after successfully completing a task. Furthermore, endeavours like this can also help young minds establish a strong bond with their teachers. As their teachers are practically the first adults other than their parents that kids look up to, mutual trust and reliability like this guarantee their emotional maturity.

What Are the Features of An Activity-Based Learning Oriented Curriculum?

As a parent, it surely can be a daunting task to decide which school you should enrol your little ones in. Academics suggest that referring to the curriculum should be your first step in this regard. The finest educational institutes follow curriculums that nurture students on par with their global counterparts to ensure they are nourished with the best-quality care and guidance.

Activity-based curriculums, interestingly, continue to become more and more commonplace across the academic sphere. This model further highlights the necessity of moving away from traditional scholastic teaching-learning methods.

The key characteristics of this model lie in its capability to encourage students to explore the field of new information to gather knowledge based on their personal experiences. Accordingly, they can interpret different data collected via active surveys to form their individual ideas and opinions. Lastly, in such an activity-based model, your kids have the scope to express these unique observations via visual presentations.

As you can gather from this discussion, your little ones can find additional motivation to be curious about subject matters in and outside their syllabus. Moreover, educationists have observed how relying on textbooks only cannot lead to a comprehensive maturation of youngsters. So, such a versatile curriculum is crucial in broadening their horizons. Moreover, with this model, kids start to understand their own responsibilities inside the classroom.

How Do Schools Utilise Activity-Based Learning?

One of the key reasons teachers are leaning toward activity-based learning is how it is capable of integrating the usage of Teaching-Learning Materials [TLM] like a diagram, doodles, models, etc., correctly. In a conventional setting, there isn’t much scope for using such dynamic visual stimuli to produce sensory responses from your little ones. An activity-oriented curriculum, however, offers ample opportunity for educators to keep the sessions exciting and fresh every day.

Suffice it to say, such a supporting tool to their learning module helps students grasp the concepts better. As audio-visual aids such as an image, video, song, or documentary film can present the things they have been reading in a more precise and vivid manner.

Another great way to lead schools to incorporate activity-based learning is via the use of kinaesthetic-oriented skill acquisition. This methodology becomes most beneficial in science-related subject matters. For instance, with proper usage of the school laboratory, kids can have hands-on experience in how different chemical reactions actually occur. In this way, they are not just blandly memorising a theory because it is written in their books. Instead, they are connecting the dots of what happens in front of their eyes and reaching a conclusion on their own.

This is the same reason this learning module encourages group discussions, where the teacher asks the students to give a presentation of what they have learned. The students, in their turn, have the chance to use different props, charts, and other equipment to back up their viewpoints. Consequently, the classroom also becomes a safe space for them where their inquisitiveness is appreciated, and their gaps in knowledge are not reprimanded.

What is the Role of a Teacher in Activity-Based Learning?

Teaching, goes the saying, is a noble profession. One cannot help but agree with this notion, observing how educators are tasked with the tricky responsibility of shaping delicate young minds. Teachers worldwide work tirelessly, playing the role of friend, philosopher, and guide to youngsters under their supervision.

Quite naturally, how your children adapt to activity-based learning depends mainly on the teachers’ capabilities of seamless fusion of this methodology with textbook-based knowledge retention. So, they must be a facilitator of the whole operation and create a comprehensive blueprint of how the ventures will be undertaken moving forward.

Therefore, teachers have to organise several unique tasks related to the topic at hand that will seem interesting to the young ones. Then, they distribute these tasks among a group of children, with youngsters having their own set of responsibilities to fulfil. These tasks can range from a quiz session to a debate that teaches them conflict resolution. Or, if it is an educational trip, they are also responsible for imparting knowledge, all the while maintaining discipline. Moreover, if there is some kind of gradation involved, the educators will also have to be adequate evaluators.

Note that the success of such endeavours is also dependent upon a proper exchange of dialogue between a child’s parents and teachers. So, it is essential for you to attend the routine parent-teacher meetings at your kids’ school to know how they are performing under an activity-based learning module.

The teachers, on the other hand, will be looped in on how your little ones are responding to such learning modules in the long run. After all, no one knows them better than you. The educators can also provide you with crucial inputs regarding the activities you can try out at home to further enhance their learning experience. For example, you can try out play-based key skill development for subjects like English, mathematics, or geography.

Suffice it to say, the importance of activity-based learning is being echoed by leading academic thinkers all over the world. According to one study, around 74% of teachers are opting for game-based education to present their lessons in a multifaceted manner. This intriguing intermingling of data-driven knowledge distribution and strategic co-operative alternative learning modules, as it seems, has the potential to reshape how institutional education functions on a large scale.