No one has learnt anything without doing it practically and getting their hands dirty. Have we ever heard of someone who has learned swimming or cycling by reading about it? Who has ever done that? You have to get into the water to learn to swim; you have to get on the wheel and paddle to learn to cycle. Learning is Doing… No one has ever learned anything without doing it himself. Then why do we have all traditional lectures and classrooms in our schools, to just teach the theoretical knowledge of the subject, without even knowing how to apply it in practical life? This is why children and parents complain about retention issues. If a child is glued to a seat for 8 long hours, attending continuous non-stop lectures one after the other, how would he be able to grasp all that information and store it in his CPU? Creating Interactive Learning Spaces is the need of the hour; especially to replace our age-old classroom or lecture hall concept.
How is an interactive teaching method more useful?
It is a proven fact that students retain only 10% percent of what they hear, 20% of what they see, 50% of what they see and write and about 80% of what they do themselves or practice. The Kinesthetic way of teaching has always been a success. Moving from a traditional classroom format of teaching to a more interactive, collaborative teaching will not only make the learning interesting but also help them retain faster and longer what they have learnt. This is one of the fundamentals of Adult Learning Principles. Any learning that is encountered by getting involved and doing it yourself will be engraved in your mind for a long time as compared to visual presentations or just audio lectures. Children feel motivated and start liking studies when they are involved and engaged. Group work or collaborative work also makes them a better team player and they adapt a spirit of teamwork. Now that we know that such learning environment is certainly more beneficial for our young learners, lets look at ways of creating interactive learning spaces for them.
Ways to create an interactive learning space:
The archive bench and desk form of symmetrical classroom will never serve the purpose of an interactive class. The space has to be more open and enable movement, kinesthetic activities and group work. It could be a huge hall with just chairs in the four corners and open space in the middle; an open field training also could result into a very interactive class. With the onset of technology advancements, many companies are coming up with such smart classes wherein you can train people on their devices and use functions like screen mirroring, video streaming etc for enhanced learning. https://www.vivi.io/ is one such company, which is actively involved in providing Interactive training solutions to Schools and Universities.
Conclusion: An interactive mode of teaching is certainly more fruitful for the child’s retention power and interest level in the topic. Hence more and more training institutions and educational organizations are advancing towards this pedagogy of training.
