LEARNER-DRIVEN PEDAGOGY - Curtain Raiser

CURTAIN RAISER

1.1 Theatrical Classroom

Think of your classroom as a theatre. If the first scene is boring, the audience is forever lost! An opera’s overture is therefore brilliantly conducted for the effect of buying over the audience. A teacher must make her lesson as irresistibly captivating an experience for the varied learners who ‘buy tickets’ for a good time as the conductor seeks to achieve for his audience.

1.2 Parallel Professions

Drawing a parallel between the teacher and the conductor of an orchestra would help focus our lenses on the learner. The conductor interacts with the composer in person or by research. S/he studies the score for the purpose of interpreting the composer’s original intentions. S/he then brings an executive personality to the orchestra, tall enough to command respect yet friendly enough to earn acceptance. Working through the score with the musicians then, with the aim of effectively communicating its very essence with the benefit of a maestro’s panoramic view, makes the cake worth the candle. The teacher thus conducts learning to make it the experience of students, who actively take charge of it, by communicating the subject matter through guidance. When this is done, s/he cedes control to the learners like the conductor who does not play a note but harnesses the skills of many to achieve a beauteous performance.

1.3 Teacher Transition

The teacher, who ought to be a learning aid worker, tends to see through a veil if s/he does not make the transition. Just like sheet music poses as a screen between the performers and the conductor, that veil transforms into illusions (or fault lines) upon which no one should lay the foundations of knowledge and the critical components for skill acquisition, let alone the sense of judgement denied the learners gathered for transforming experiences. Teachers must make the paradigm shift. Otherwise, erroneous principles upon which traditional strategies are based persist in the classroom and society bears the brunt. But the collective abilities of students in learner-driven lessons are powerful enough to transform a society. It all begins with the learning aid worker.

1.4 Twenty-first Century Strategies

What twenty-first century teachers want to do is reverse the familiar position where the teacher who should be conducting functions as a violinist or trumpeter. Today’s treasured teachers guide and prompt learners to drive the very lessons that brought them to school.