Energizing students from an early age to embrace curiosity and explore their ideas and environment produces incredible results.
The Leonardo Effect is a form of interdisciplinary teaching
centered around “synchronised integration” of subjects. Combining art and
science has given children the opportunity to explore their ideas which intern has
allowed teacher to deviate from the strict guidelines of the curriculum. This
means that they can construct less constrictive and more productive lesson
plans. This is all down to the so called “Leonardo Effect”, which has seen
overwhelming success across schools in the UK.
Schools all over the UK have been implementing a project
examining the “Leonardo Effect” and thus far not a single negative response has
emerged. Quite remarkable considering that have been 1,200 comments (Hepburn, 2008). This shows
the astounding support the Leonardo Effect has from both parents and pupils.
The two main characteristics of the project were combining
science with creativity and artistic expression, and empowering the students.
This means that the pupils were in charge of what they were doing. Throwing a
lesson plan completely out of the window can be quite stressful for teachers as
it can lead to a “more noisy and messy” classroom. However, external evaluators
have found that seemingly uninterested children had now become “fanatical”
about their work (Hepburn, 2008).
The Leonardo Effect is made up of four main principles
designed to better engage children and remove barriers to leaning:
The first stage is capturing the children’s imagination. I’m
sure we’ve all had the experience of “when am I ever going to use this
information”, which is why the Leonardo Effect encourages using first-hand
experience in contexts that are relevant for the children being taught to
inspire self-generated questions. Children have a natural curiosity so
utilizing discovery-based activities using a range of research tools methods as
multimedia, books, and fellow pupils, will make the children feel more empowered
which will make them feel energized to learn.
The second stage is development. This is where the children
develop their ideas and conduct experiments to test their hypothesis. This
enables students to make connections, drawing out the learning process to help
them develop key skills, valuable information and a more complete
understanding.
The third stage is creation. In this section pupils are
challenged to utilize their knowledge and skills in an innovation and creative
context. This tasks their higher learning level, something which would not
happen under normal curriculum circumstances. There is evidence to suggest that
from early years to key stage 3, this process works.
The fourth and final stage is reflect and communicate. This
section is about drawing conclusions and the students are asked to reflect on
their own work and discuss their findings to a wider audience. This could happen
aurally or visually, it is up to the individual student on how they want to
represent their findings.
During a class seminar our lecturer suggested we use
techniques from the Leonardo Effect to see if it could positively affect our
learning on a particular subject. The class was split into 4 groups of 5 and we
were given the names of the four basic elements; fire, water, earth and air.
Each group was then given an element and 5 minutes to think of as many words
that they could associate with their given element. After the 5 minutes were
up, each group switched to another groups table and were instructed to do the
same thing but for the other groups element. Once each group had visited every
element, the groups had to think of questions that related to each element. At
the end of the lecture each group were tasked to research just one word that
was associated with their element and create a presentation based solely on
that one word. The group I was placed in had the “water” element, so we
decided, as a group, to use the word “tide” to research in more depth. We
researched how both the sun and the moon affected the tide and what the Earth
would be like if we had no tides. We they presented our findings in a small
visual presentation in front of our entire class, and were given praise for
what they thought we had done well, and constructive criticism on things that
we could have perhaps improved on.
This technique proved very useful as much of the information
we gathered from our research, I can still recall. Which is a testament to how
well the Leonardo Effect works in the education process.
Reference List
Hepburn, H. (2008, January 25). The Leonardo Effect Takes Flight.
Retrieved from Tes: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2571081
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