Anchored Instruction strikes me as a more guided form of PBL. It seems to require the most intense planning on the part of the instructor, unless a video or other multi-media format exists that can deliver the problem at hand.
Dr. Oliver made a good point in his slide presentation that I’ve touched on in other blog posts, but seems worthy of mentioning again. There are so many excellent teaching strategies and techniques out there, but we are often forced to lecture students in order to meet the overwhelming requirements of many standardized curricula. There’s little time to waste with “delivering” information to our students, and employing many of the techniques and strategies we’ve discussed in this course is next to impossible given our time constraints. At the same time, we wonder why our educational system is failing our children and not preparing them for life outside of the classroom!!
As a foreign language teacher, much of what I do touches on the strategies within Anchored Instruction. Students are very often exposed to some type of scenario in which they must detect a situational problem and (in the target language) communicate their need to somebody to solve it. This is very often accomplished in small group settings and is shared as a class afterward. It’s actually a pretty easy way to get my students communicating in Spanish when I choose a “fun” problem for them to solve. They absolutely love relationship drama!
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Hi Paul. I agree with you about the time pressures. It does seem like all of these approaches require an enormous amount of time and effort on the part of the teacher. I see a lot of appeal in having teachers, say from different schools, develop a repository of activities that they could draw from.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious -- in the activities that you do with your students, do you use video? If so, do you create it yourself?
Sherry
I too agree that time is the biggest obstacle that we all face. I have attended workshops and gotten great info from them only to get back to school and not have the time to put it into practice. I feel that making the information interesting and relevant to the students will increase retention. Making it fun is also the best ingredient to a successful lesson as well.
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