by Priya Gopal
Classrooms are places where a group of growing, thinking individuals meet every day to learn. This process, however, for years, has been weighed down by the seriousness of exams and teaching.
Have you thought why six-year-olds crack computer games but don’t like to do handwriting exercises? What can be more monotonous and boring than having to write pages simply for the sake of writing?
The ‘Feel Good’ Factor
Science shows that learning happens when the individual feels good about what they are learning. When you enjoy something your body releases serotonin that makes you feel good about what you are doing, which motivates you to learn. It’s commonly observed that all human beings are attracted to learning what interests them and brings them joy. This interest is irrigated by the happiness and pleasure they derive out of performing the task.
Therefore, a child who enjoys the learning process surely learns more. When concepts are taught in a way that appeals to the child they learn better. This way, learning is more permanent and they remember it for a longer time. Fun in the classroom is, therefore, a great way to get children learning.
Bringing in the Fun Element
Ask a child when he has the most fun and the answers will range from playing on the ground to going for picnics to playing games on the computer to reading a book. No student usually ever says I had fun in chemistry class or the math period or that English classes are fun!
Fun as a word somehow has developed a contextual meaning of unregulated pleasure and definitely something non-academic. Academics has the baggage of being boring, serious, exam-oriented and something to be done, only because the system in India works like that. Academics needs to shed this very tag of being serious and be more fun to find acceptability among children.
Research scholars are constantly emphasizing on how important fun is in education. Most schools find classrooms unmanageable because they are not able to engage with the children. Children love to learn when the learning has meaning and is relevant to them. When learning is fun, it’s engaging and gives meaning to the child. Even the most difficult concepts can be taught to very young children in a way that is enjoyable. The use of manipulatives in education has always been emphasized by research. Technology is able to add a lot of value to education today. It is able to help teachers present difficult topics in colourful and animated forms while also keeping children engaged. But not schools have exploited the potential of technology in making learning fun.
Engagement flows where there is fun. The story of Vishnu Sharma and the Panchatantras is a perfect example. The king was unable to get his princes to learn anything. Vishnu Sharma taught them all that they needed to learn through the stories of the Panchatantra. He realized that discoursing to them would not engage them. He had to reach them through their area of interests.
A Change in Approach
Classrooms need to be spaces where children can think, talk, discuss, debate and evolve as creative and thinking people. They are not meant to be spaces where children sit quietly, listen to what the teachers have to speak and simply memorise what the question papers require of them.
A very common refrain from Indian teachers is ‘Is this a classroom or a fish market?’ Most of us have grown up hearing our teachers shout this in class. I am sure I too have used this when I began my teaching career and was expected to maintain discipline in class. This implies that students ought to be quiet and passive recipients of what the teachers offered.
The moment teachers realise that the classroom is a fish market and that it needs to be one for learning to happen, we know that teachers are evolving and our classrooms are changing. Observe a fish market – organized sales, haggling, bargaining, loading, off-loading and transportation – all of it happens. No action is done in isolation. It is a hub of physical and mental activity. That’s how our classrooms need to be – active, fun, engaging, stimulating and making our children ask for more!
Classrooms need to look fun, talk fun and teach fun. Sadly, for most schools, children are not taken seriously. As John Dewey, the famous American Educational Reformer, remarked, “the center of gravity is outside the child”. The focus of the teacher and the school is on teaching the planned curriculum, completion of portion and administration of assessments when the centre of gravity in a classroom has to be on children’s learning (in a way they enjoy and participate in) and not just teaching!
Educationist Alfie Kohn rightly suggests that somewhere the parent is also responsible for the way the education system today works.
Consider what he writes in his blog (http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/progressive-education/)
And then (as my audiences invariably point out) there are parents who have never been invited to reconsider their assumptions about education. As a result, they may be impressed by the wrong things, reassured by signs of traditionalism — letter grades, spelling quizzes, heavy textbooks, a teacher in firm control of the classroom — and unnerved by their absence. Even if their children are obviously unhappy, parents may accept that as a fact of life. Instead of wanting the next generation to get better than we got, it’s as though their position was: “Listen, if it was bad enough for me, it’s bad enough for my kids.” Perhaps they subscribe to what might be called the Listerine theory of education, based on a famous ad campaign that sought to sell this particular brand of mouthwash on the theory that if it tasted vile, it obviously worked well. The converse proposition, of course, is that anything appealing is likely to be ineffective. If a child is lucky enough to be in a classroom featuring, say, student-designed project-based investigations, the parent may wonder, “But is she really learning anything? Where are the worksheets?” And so the teachers feel pressure to make the instruction worse…
The Road Map for Fun in Classrooms
The good news is that things have slowly started to change and that’s why you see many schools incorporating fun in the classrooms.
Many schools in India have begun with the way classrooms look. They don’t have dreary and dull walls. Instead they are decorated with charts that are topical, birthday charts and smart bright colours that make a child feel like sitting in the classroom. Multi-coloured furniture add to the décor. But sadly we seem to stop there. The process in the classroom needs to be equally fun.
Teachers should manipulate classroom seating, take children outside, narrate stories, show videos, sing songs and encourage discussions.
Teachers who believe that fun learning adds value to their teaching will ensure that they create situations that make sessions fun. But again, in most schools, the idea of fun teaching is limited to the junior grades. Everyone seems to agree that preschool children need fun to learn. But as children grow older, teachers and schools tend to grow more serious.
Difficult topics can definitely be taught in very interesting ways. Of course, this needs a lot of intrinsic motivation on the part of the teacher or extrinsic motivation in the philosophy of the school. Sometimes both don’t happen. I remember teaching a bunch of grade V girls a poem on animals. So at the end of the class I made them sing Old Mc Donald and they thoroughly enjoyed it.
But woe! I was pulled up by the principal for breaking discipline in the school! A few years later I met a girl from the class who rushed up to me in a mall and said, “Ma’am I will always remember the song Old Mc Donald rhyme that we sang in class. Too bad you left school so soon!” The song had more impact on the little girl than anything else.
My daughter learned some chemistry formulae which were set to the music of the Bollywood song Kajrare (which was a hit number when she was in Grade 9). She remembers them even today as learning this way added spice to something that’s usually perceived as boring and monotonous.
Fun need not mean dance and music or watching videos always. Fun means where the learner is actively engaged in learning. Working in pairs or groups, doing tasks that make the child think and discover more, making the child participate in his own learning is also fun.
As parents, our perceptions of schools need to change. Parents carry the cultural baggage of their schooling along with them. Looking at things from a business perspective, parents are often perceived by schools as the ‘customer’. Schools want to retain their customers and thus cater to the demands of the parents. Parents need to understand that fun in the classroom is created with research that backs its efficacy. When they let schools do their job, rather than let their insecurities meddle with school programs, and allow their children have fun learning, they will realise that their children will succeed because of their school and not in spite of it.
Schools and teachers need to wean parents out of their insecurities that arise due to cut-throat competition. The cycle is vicious, but someone needs to start. When a good meaning school begins its process, the least parents can do is to support their efforts.
Schools and teachers need to rethink their philosophy of education. Do they want to follow patterns that are ancient and outdated or do they want to make learning more meaningful for students? A common question that teachers face with a class of around forty students and with only forty minutes teaching time at hand is “What do you expect me to do?”
Well, to begin with, some simple things….
- Make children do a twenty-second round ‘Sit down, Stand up’. This gets the class refreshed for the next topic.
- Develop a special clap for your class. Whenever your class finishes a task well, treat your class to it.
- Encourage team work, peer teaching and student participation in the teaching process.
When you let your students learn with fun, they will be empowered to learn better.
As schools move ahead, and teachers carry the bastion forward, I really hope schools and teachers are open to making the way smoother for children to learn. Eventually, schools need to grow into places where children want to come back every Monday morning!
Picture from https://www.flickr.com/photos/sharath-sridhar/
Well researched and nicely written , but little too long that lost the fun element in reading the full article