The Strategy

Use activity in your lesson, try it out as a starter,
   Allow the learners to express what they already know,
     And make them realize ‘already’ could turn better.
Don’t forget analysis, and process that activity;
   To clarify interpretations, to connect assumptions with reality,
Don’t obstruct the abstraction, they might be missing some points,
    reinforce the lesson thrust, and connect all the joints,
End it up with application, don’t settle for just interpretation,
    Need to test it in real situations, go for active experimentation.

baw!

I was planning to write a simple blog when I thought of doing this. Don’t mind the childish rhymes, I just wanted to try something different. 

 On a more serious note, I think this experiential learning approach, also referred as andragogy really is effective. The four-fold structure of “know what student knows”(activity), “clarify what they know and do not”(analysis), “add more to what they have”(abstraction) and “test new learning into real life situation”(application) is definitely a must strategy to be incorporated in our attempt at educating the modern students. Gone are the days when they would spend hours listening to long lectures, and just long lectures. We teachers should in a sense be like google in providing relevant information, like facebook in delivering diverse perspectives and like wiki in filtering wrong presuppositions. We should aim for the four-fold system of the andragogy instead of the one sided “just take note and listen” methodology.