The school curriculum has been built so that students can expand and develop their knowledge and experience by connecting them to new learning.
Pupils often experience difficulty in relating their learning to what they know about the world around them. They may also find it difficult to see the relevance of what they are learning. This creates barriers to both learning and teaching. Learners should be able to draw from their past experience/knowledge to gain new ‘truths’. I have tried to encourage my pupils to do just that by giving them the necessary information and then allowing them to investigate and come up with their own ideas/meanings/understanding of the topic. While the class goes about with their investigation, as a teacher, I mainly stand as a facilitator and to monitor and offer support as needed .
The science curriculum has evolved to involve real life experiences for students through which they can relate to the idea other than its abstract form. These involve work-based experiences. Another way this has impacted the curriculum is to get the pupils to have a hands on involvement in the class activity. For example, being able to explain to pupils about electromagnets is fair enough but for them to actually have a ‘play’ with coils, power packs and paper clips (with a bit of guidance!) pupils can actually come up with things that affect the strength of electromagnets (without the teacher giving away all the information!). The important thing is that, the more pupils are involved with their learning and in an active manner, the more they’ll be able to gain better understanding and retain what they have learnt.