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ACTIVE LEARNING

There have been significant pendulum shifts in classroom delivery in the average African primary and secondary schools. Before 1960's, the pendulum swing was on the class teacher as superiority of teaching and learning. The class teacher determined what was to be taught, what was to be tested and how it was to be taught. The child was considered as an empty vessel, that had nothing to contribute to the teaching and learning process. At that time it was just okay for a child to regurgitate a seemingly right response. The teacher never cared and so given the above painted scenario, it was conventional to describe the teaching and learning at the same time.
   The emphasis on the child somehow minimized the role of the teacher. Today, the pendulum has swung to the middle. The teaching is still child centered. However, the teacher has some vital roles to play in the child centered education. For instance, the teacher must ensure that instruction is activity based. The teacher is to provide enormous hands on activities for the child so that the child can practice under the watchful eyes of the teacher, the knowledge, the skills and attitude of the teacher has modeled and demonstrated. Thus, it is not enough to tell the child of a given concept, information or experience. The teacher has modelled or demonstrated. Besides, the teacher must ensure that learning is interactive. That is to say the child must interact with other children and the teacher as the child learns the knowledge, information, experience, or ideas which the teacher present. Thus communal, collaborative and cooperative learning is now being promoted in our classrooms so that our children can interact and learn from one another. Besides, the teacher is encouraged to promote continuous assessments.
   In a continuous assessment paradigm the evaluation of the child's performance is no longer to be based on a single test or a few classroom tests. The teacher is expected to give the child a battery of tests from time to time. The performance of the child is stored in a portfolio. From a collection of the performance over a given period of time the teacher can identify the strengths and challenges which the child encounters in learning. Besides, the performances of the child in tasks over a given period of time can enable the teacher to predict predict the direction or specialization or expertise the child is likely to take. Another useful trend in the use of continuous assessment is that it does not other norms or population in evaluating the performance of the child. It's evaluation of the performances of the child is based on the data collected over a period of time.

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