As a result of today’s first inputs on the ‘Developing Effectiveness in Learning and Teaching’ module, I began reminiscing back to my own primary school experience and asking myself the question, what was most memorable for me? In all honestly, from this I came up rather short, I cannot really remember any particular lessons or topics where I felt truly encapsulated or 100% engaged. During the process of wracking my brain and asking my primary school friends about their memories I finally remembered something, one of the only times learning seemed interactive and fun. It was in Primary 6 and we had been talking about news articles and recent events which lead on to us organising our own new shows within our groups. Our task was within our groups to each take up a role within a news show such as the anchors, sports reporter, weather person etc. We then had to work to gather to collect all the news and information we would need ready to present our news shows to the other groups at the end of the week. I still remember the excitement that it brought purely because it was one of the first time we, as pupils, had been completely in charge of our learning. We could decide how we were going to structure our news show, we could decide what research we were going to do and what topics we were going to cover as well as what roles we were going to adopt. Everyone in the class appeared to enjoy the experience and as a result this became a monthly thing.
At the time this whole experience purely seemed like a bit of fun and a way of getting away from the textbooks. I never thought I was actually learning. However, looking back now I can see the amount of skills and knowledge I gained from this experience. We were learning co-operation skills from working in our groups as well as the organisation and delegation skills which go along side this. We were learning how to independently research our specific news stories which in turn gave us the knowledge to know what was going on in the world and the real life issues that were being faced in different areas of the world as well as our own country.
Overall, I believe that this experience within the classroom is so memorable purely because it was something completely different to what we usually done within the classroom and something which helped me gain an array of skills. Also I feel that because this task was very much pupil led it added to the memorability because as a pupil I felt as though I had an important role to play and it allowed me to take ownership of my own learning.
