Authentic learning teaching model

New Educational Reforms

By Dr. Laalitha Liyanage

When you compare the students, who enter a university, with the children who enter Grade One in a school, you find some key differences. Grade One students are bubbling with curiosity, full of questions and are not afraid to ask them. The students who enter university are not at all curious; they do not have questions and they are afraid to ask any. In Sri Lanka, only eight percent of the students who enter Grade One get the opportunity to enrol for a university degree programme.

Our schools and universities have become institutions that produce grades and not intellectuals or citizens who can think. The best of the best enter our universities, filtered through examinations. By the time they gain university admission, they have been converted to machines with one goal––getting good grades.

The employee statistics in the 2020 final report of the creative and cultural industries in Sri Lanka by the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka, indicates that about 54 percent of the employees in creative industries have educational qualifications equal to or below the GCE O/L and only 12 percent have educational qualification above the GCE A/L. This gives a rough idea on what these standardised examinations measure. Creativity and critical thinking as well as collaboration and communications, are the 4Cs that represent the skills in demand in the 21st century. They are all but left out of our education system and therefore they are not tested at the majority of examinations.

According to the Global Creativity Index (GCI), in 2015 Sri Lanka ranked 106 out of 139 countries in the world. The World Exports on Creative Goods in 2015 totalled a massive US $ 509 billion, out of which Sri Lanka could only capture 0.04 percent. Creative innovation is now needed by all industries. Innovations are driven by research and development, which is carried out by researchers.

According to the Research and Development Survey of the National Science Foundation in 2018 Sri Lanka has about 290 researchers per million of the population. The number of researchers in South Korea per million of the population is over 9,000. After 76 years of free education it is evident that the current education system is falling far behind the expectations of modern economies to provide the necessary human capital.

Educational reforms aimed at rectifying this situation are to be rolled out in 2023. The focus of the new educational reforms, headed by the educational visionary Dr. Upali Sedere, is the Authentic Learning teaching model (AL) that attempts to cultivate these very qualities that are lacking in the current system. The word ‘authentic’ is commonly used in the marketing field to indicate that a certain product or service is genuine and not a copy. Therefore, AL defines what genuine learning is. It is set in the constructivist paradigm where knowledge and skill have to be constructed by the individual. Therefore, a large portion of the learning task has to be done through self-learning. This is one of the hallmarks of AL.

In AL model learning takes place through problems or situations set in the real-world. The student is enabled to engage in a real-world problem, faced by a real person. It can be a farmer facing a problem in his or her paddy field or a president of the astronomy club of a school. As long as the role and the situations are real it can be used to teach essential concepts and skills. Putting students into real-world situations enables them to take on the role and responsibility of a real person, to act like an adult and do what adults do. However, the student is not left alone to figure out the solutions to these problems. The lessons in AL have to guide the students to ask questions, imagine, plan and solve the problem within a given real-life situation.

To achieve this, lessons in AL should have the following characteristics.

1. The lesson should be centred around a real-world situation called an Authentic Context. An Authentic Context will include a real-life role(s) which the student(s) could take on to solve the problems, such as a farmer, mechanic, an office worker, a scientist or an environmentalist.
2. Certain real-world tasks (authentic tasks) are performed by the real-life role(s) which would be performed by the students. Eg: Drafting a method to check polluted water, drawing a circuit diagram or selecting certain equipment necessary for a repair.
3. Students should have the opportunity to meet experts relevant to the authentic context either via digital media or personal visits. Local professionals could be brought to the school and parents who are professionals could participate as teachers in the class.
4. Finalised real-world products should result from these real-world tasks. Eg: a poster, dialogue for an educational advertisement, scaled models or working prototypes.
5. The performance of the students on authentic tasks and products will be assessed according to performance standards given by rubrics that specify the criteria and the standard of performance.

The role of the teacher in AL is to first prepare a lesson that provides a holistic learning experience for students to construct knowledge and hone skills themselves. Second, the orchestration of the AL lesson is done by the teacher. The teacher will be a gentle guide and a sounding board for bouncing of ideas and questions. He or she will respond with questions and arguments that will spark ideas and highlight the deficiencies or misconceptions in students’ thinking. Through Socratic dialogue the teacher will lead the students to greater inquiry and knowledge as Socrates did centuries ago.

Authentic Contexts can open-up the students’ world to unfamiliar situations in different geographical and cultural contexts and broaden the perspective of students. A lesson framed around a global situation can be used to successfully develop global citizens. Students could be working on problems that are on a completely different continent where people speak a different language. The integration of concepts from a wide range of subjects is possible through rich learning experiences in the AL. Integrations such as arts and engineering, history and mathematics as well as literature and science could be achieved through authentic contexts. Teamwork, collaboration and communication among peers is a must in AL lessons. This is how people work in the real world. People do not solve problems by themselves but as organisations, teams, groups or companies. By employing AL, teachers will be able to make students industry ready from day one.

For knowledge construction to happen authentic tasks should require a considerable amount of thinking power (cognitive processing) by the students. If little or no cognitive processing is required by the tasks, then learning will not happen. The tasks should get the gear wheels in the brain turning and stir-up a storm of ideas that would be evaluated by the group and employed as possible solutions. Watered-down tasks can easily stop the thinking process and switch the learning process from knowledge construction to remembering facts in order to regurgitate it later. In order to move learning from lower-order thinking skills, to higher-order thinking skills the tasks should be complex with no visible solution at the beginning of the lesson. This seems to be an uphill challenge for seasoned teachers, to change themselves from deliverers of facts and information to constructors of knowledge. One of the hallmarks of a complex task is that each student group will come up with a unique solution different from others. Therefore there will be a variety of answers just as in the real-world.

However an educational reform cannot be realised through an innovative vision alone. For the current educational reform to be successful, the stakeholder government institutions must be able to comprehend this new model, embrace it and promote it wholeheartedly. One of the main weaknesses of AL is that it can be mistaken for other teaching models such as activity-based learning. Moreover, these differences are not very apparent. In an AL learning experience the student does not go through a set of unrelated activities that exhibits the use of factual knowledge. Such a lesson will not allow students to construct new knowledge by themselves.

The stakeholder institutions might not be willing to embrace AL 100 percent due to the indirect process through which AL delivers content. The hallmark of the Sri Lankan free education paradigm has always been the delivery of factual information in the form of textbooks. AL lessons only provide minimal factual knowledge. However, the lessons are rich with authentic tasks and guidance on how to go about fulfilling them. Completing these tasks will require the student to search and learn facts, concepts and skills necessary to solve those problems without being confined to a limited number of pages of a textbook. AL lessons do not have solutions relating to those problems.

Sri Lankan teachers have always relied on the teacher guide to indicate what information should be given to what depth. Although some of that information will still be available in an AL teacher guide, it will mostly have guidelines on how to guide the students to ask questions, how to manage student groups, guide these groups to construct solutions and the evaluation criteria and performance standards. Since the solutions to the real-world problems are finished products such as dialogues, posters and prototypes they will have a high variability in outcome from student to student. Therefore a single solution cannot be specified in any teacher guide. Therefore, personnel in the government educational institutions might see this as a threat to the free-education concept if they view free education as delivering free textbooks with very limited amounts of information.

However, AL does not pose a threat to the free education paradigm at all. In the 21st century, the teacher cannot act as the sole deliverer of information due to the massive amount of information that is available through traditional and digital sources. However he or she can act as a guide to these sources through recommendations. Through a textbook the student is given access only to a very limited amount of information or facts which narrows the scope of students’ vision. In AL, students will not sit by themselves and listen to a teacher deliver information, but engage in solving real world problems for which they will select and absorb information.

The role of the teacher in AL is to facilitate students’ learning and keep them on-track through identifying deviations from the problem and the development of misconceptions. Through an AL lesson, students will be able to access a vast amount of information such as interviews with experts, documentaries, libraries, magazines, blogs and vlogs. This surpasses the amount of information any textbook could provide. However, what the textbook does provide is a multitude of opportunities to gather this information through real-world scenarios and recommendations of information sources.

Sri Lanka needs change-makers with 21st century skills and a global mindset to jump start our knowledge-based economy and secure our place in the world. Such individuals will not be produced by an education system which focuses on lower-order thinking skills and excludes the majority of higher-order thinking skills such as creativity and critical thinking. It is the duty of the stakeholder institutions to perceive the value of the vision behind this educational reform and to produce its benefits to the upliftment of the education system which would then develop the needed human capital for Sri Lanka.

[The writer is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Applied Computing, Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya with a B.Sc (Special, Peradeniya), M.Sc (Physics, USA), Ph.D (Engineering, USA) and can be reached at laalitha@kln.ac.lk]