Making my lessons a more authentic experience.

2.1.4
From my experience with school practice supervision, I noticed that student teachers all teach their lessons in the same way- not distinguishing one lesson as being different from the other;not taking cognizance of the fact that no two classes are the same; and not taking care of his/her own creativity nor that of the student.

The crux of this matter lies with the way I as a lecturer could have presented my self and my mode of teaching- telling them to do one thing , while I do not strictly follow it during my delivery of the lecture- making them detached from the actual practice.

I would like to use this illustration from Jonassen et al (1999), to illustrate what I would do to make my learning experiences more authentic:

 Meaningful learning occurs when learners actively interpret their experience using internal, cognitive operations which  requires that I change my role from sage to guide. 

Since students learn from thinking about what they are doing, my role becomes one of stimulating and supporting activities that engage learners in thinking. 

 Meaningful learning requires knowledge to be constructed by the learner, not transmitted from me  to the student 

To experience meaningful learning, students need to do much more than access or seek information—they need to know how to examine, perceive, interpret and experience information.

Therefore, a authentic learning experience is one that is:

• Active (manipulative): We interact with the environment manipulate the objects within it and observe the effects of our manipulations. 
• Constructive and reflective: Activity is essential but insufficient for meaningful learning. We must reflect on the activity and our observations, and interpret them in order to have a meaningful learning experience. 
• Intentional: Human behaviour is naturally goal-directed. When students actively try to achieve a learning goal that they have articulated, they think and learn more. For students to experience meaningful learning, they must be able to articulate their own learning goals and monitor their own progress. 
• Authentic (complex and contextual): Thoughts and ideas rely on the contexts in which they occur in order to have meaning. Presenting facts that are stripped from their contextual clues divorces knowledge from reality. Learning is meaningful, better understood and more likely to transfer to new situations when it occurs by engaging with real-life, complex problems. 

Cooperative (collaborative and conversational): We live, work and learn in communities, naturally seeking ideas and assistance from each other, and negotiating about problems and how to solve them. It is in this context that we learn there are numerous ways to view the world and a variety of solutions to most problems. Meaningful learning, therefore, requires conversations and group experiences

This can be achieved by use of technology to re -imagine learning.