Education has evolved over the years, and the need for transforming the methodologies used for learning has become increasingly evident. Teaching a lesson alone is not enough to help students reach their full potential; instead, it has been found to be more effective to create spaces for students to learn autonomously and creatively.
In this blog, we will explore four essential components to identify how and why it is necessary to transform the concept of teaching into creating spaces for learning.
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Personalized and Collaborative Learning
One of the greatest advantages of creating learning spaces is that they can be tailored to the individual needs of each student. Each person has a unique learning pace and style, so an environment that encourages autonomy, creativity, and peer-to-peer collaboration is much more effective in helping each student learn in a meaningful way.
Encourage Curiosity
Learning is not only about gaining knowledge, but also about awakening curiosity and a passion for discovering new things. By creating spaces for learning, students are encouraged to explore, experiment, and discover autonomously, thereby fostering a love of learning.
Improving Knowledge Retention
Many times, students study a lesson merely to pass a test, only to quickly forget what they have learned. Therefore, by creating spaces for learning, students are actively involved in the learning process and retain knowledge better in the long term. For example, by focusing on challenges, students can face a problem and come up with a solution. This way, they not only retain information temporarily but also transform it into living knowledge that can be applied to any challenge they may encounter. This process is known as ‘meaningful learning.’
The Learning Experience
Education should not only focus on theoretical knowledge but also on the development of practical skills. When generating spaces for learning, projects, activities, and practical experiments can be included to help students apply what they have learned and develop useful skills in the real world. Let’s consider the following challenge:
There is a cycling team competition in your city in time trial mode, offering a direct quota for the national Olympics to teams that reach the finish line in less than 87 minutes. The sports training institute where you work has decided to participate in the event, appointing you as the technical director. As such, it is your duty to plan the strategy for the 40-kilometer race course, taking into account the performance and power of the cyclists in each segment.
As seen in the previous challenge, there is a context associated with a cycling competition: the challenge is to have the race teams reach the finish line in less than 87 minutes. The student’s role is that of the technical director of a sports training institute. With this in mind, a question arises: what will the student learn? If I were to tell you that the concept of piecewise functions will be applied in performance planning for a cycling race, allowing them to relate a mathematical concept to an application in a real-world context, what would you think?
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In CloudLabs, students apply concepts by solving challenges, allowing them to gain a better understanding of them. In this case, the piecewise function is studied, which is a function that changes depending on the value of the variable. Additionally, the types of functions such as constant, exponential, linear, and quadratic functions are identified; with these concepts, the student can relate to and observe which function was used by the cyclist with the best performance in each section, all in the pursuit of completing the race in the shortest possible time. All these mathematical definitions can be applied to professional challenges, such as creating performance reports for professional cycling teams.
The above is an example of how generating a learning space can maximize students learning by exploring, in this case mathematics, in a fun and less abstract way. Therefore, by creating learning spaces, you can ask questions, present problems, and challenge students to think creatively and analytically, thus developing their maximum creativity.
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