The purpose of orientation is to prepare students’ minds for receiving and processing new knowledge. Orientation also raises interest towards the new information to be learned. Orientation activates students’ prior knowledge and helps them make the right connections between the new knowledge and their pre-existing notions. This way, new information is easier to understand and it becomes relevant to learners.
For orientation, students can be given a new theme to work with, or a problem or claim related to that theme. Students can, for instance, map out their previous knowledge of the topic, analyze that knowledge and ask questions based on their pre-existing notions. Orientation tasks can be written presentations, charts, pictures, concept maps etc. Students can work on their orientation exercises either alone, in pairs or in small groups. The exercises can also be carried out online. Also, a short story or a case example can work as an orientation for the following theme.
The purpose of the lesson is often to help learners acquire new knowledge. There are at least three main possibilities of obtaining new knowledge. New knowledge can be acquired by
The traditional way of obtaining new knowledge is that of the teacher teaching the students. This can also be done in an activating way by using the activating lecture method. Sometimes it is also good to let the students themselves find knowledge and let them teach each other. By doing so, they also gain valuable skills such as information seeking and processing.
Students also tend to remember the things they found out themselves much better than those that were told by the teacher. According to scientific studies, the most effective way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. This applies to students as well.
The scientific studies state it very clearly: if you want the students to learn something, you have to activate them to do it by themselves. New knowledge or skills cannot be transferred from the teacher to the students as such. If the learners are not activated somehow to process the new information by themselves, they cannot truly understand and learn the new information.
Activating the students is especially vital if you aim at deep learning and good learning results.
Activating can be done in various ways, for instance:
Reflection means thinking about and analyzing one’s own learning. Reflective learners process their learning, relate it to what they already know, adapt it to suit their own purposes, and translate thoughts into action. Reflection develops creativity, the ability to critically evaluate information and ideas, as well as metacognitive skills (the ability to think about one’s own thinking).
Furthermore, reflecting one's own learning enhances deep learning. Through reflection, new knowledge sticks to one’s knowledge structure and is more easily remembered afterwards.
To promote reflection, students can think about the following questions: