Active learning

Active learning is learning which engages and challenges children and young peoples thinking using real-life and
imaginary situations. It takes full advantage of the opportunities for learning presented by:

spontaneous play
planned, purposeful play
investigating and exploring
events and life experiences
focused learning and teaching.
All active learning opportunities can be supported when necessary through sensitive intervention to support or extend
learning. All areas of the curriculum, at all stages, can be enriched and developed through an active approach.
Active learning has long been an established approach in early years settings, and when asked to reflect on what
active learning might look like in early primary school, delegates to a Curriculum for Excellence conference for early
years suggested:
'A true building on experiences in nursery. Hands-on independent play with appropriate skilled intervention/teaching.'
'Children learn by doing, thinking, exploring, through quality interaction, intervention and relationships, founded on
childrens interests and abilities across a variety of contexts. All combining to building the four capacities for each
child.'
'Environments that offer differential play and challenge, staff who are well informed and able to challenge learning,
child-centred and building on previous experiences, fun absolutely essential, children planning and evaluating their
learning.'

Active learning and the four capacities

Active learning can support learners' development of the four capacities in many ways. For example, they can develop
as:

successful learners through using their imagination and creativity, tackling new experiences and learning from
them, and developing important skills including literacy and numeracy through exploring and investigating while
following their own interests
confident individuals through succeeding in their activities, having the satisfaction of a task accomplished, learning
about bouncing back from setbacks, and dealing safely with risk
responsible citizens through encountering different ways of seeing the world, learning to share and give and take,
learning to respect themselves and others, and taking part in making decisions
effective contributors through interacting together in leading or supporting roles, tackling problems, extending
communication skills, taking part in sustained talking and thinking, and respecting the opinions of others.

Schemata
Schemata are cognitive structures representing generic knowledge, i.e. structures which do not contain information
about particular entities, instances or events, but rather about their general form. Readers use schemata to make sense
of events and descriptions by providing default background information for comprehension, as it is rare and often
unnecessary for texts to contain all the detail required for them to be fully understood. Usually, many or even most of
the details are omitted, and readers schemata compensate for any gaps in the text. As schemata represent the
knowledge base of individuals, they are often culturally and temporally specific, and are ordinarily discussed as collective
stores of knowledge shared by prototypical members of a given or assumed community. The term was used in the 1930s
in both psychology and literary theory, but entered wider currency in the 1970s in Artificial Intelligence research, later
being re-incorporated into psychology and thence into linguistics, within the general area of cognitive science.

Object of Punishment:
The principal object of punishment is the prevention of offence, and a national penal policy of the
State should aim to protect the society and reclaim the criminal by evolving measures to prevent
people from committing crimes.
There are, however, four different theories of punishment, viz., Deterrent, Preventive, Retributive and
Reformative.

2. Deterrent:
The object of criminal justice in awarding punishment, according to this theory is to deter people from
committing a crime. Commission of offences must be made as a bad bargain for the offender.
The infliction of punishment serves as a check on others who are evil-minded. But this theory is not
absolutely correct for a hardened criminal becomes accustomed to the severity of punishment and no
amount of deterrence prevents him from indulging in crime.

3. Preventive:
It aims to prevent a repetition to the offence by the offender by such penalties as imprisonment, death
and exile. This form of punishment also fails to achieve the desired end. Persons who visit jail once
are habituated to it.
With the advancement of civilization death sentence has also become incongruous, for murders are
in a large number of cases never premeditated.

4. Retributive:
According to it the offender should be made to suffer in proportion to the injury caused to the victim,
viz., and a tooth for a tooth or an eye for an eye. It is a barbarous form of punishment and betrays an
utter ignorance of the causes that lead to crime.

5. Reformative:
The object of the punishment must not be to wreak vengeance but so to reform the criminal as to
prevent him from further crime. Crime like all other diseases should be properly diagnosed and
treated scientifically.
Crime is a malady and the aim of every punishment should be the reclamation of the offender by prescribing proper treatment. Uninvestigated criminals are an expensive luxury. The message of
Mahatma Gandhi Hate the sin and not the sinner, should guide the reformer in adopting a judicious
penal policy.
For the society contains within itself the germs of all the crimes that are about to be committed, and
the criminal is only the instrument which executes them. In the new era of prison reform medical treatment on the basis of the study of the causative factors of crime will play a very important part.

Zone of Proximal Development

The zone of proximal development (ZPD) has been defined as "the distance between the actual
developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential
development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more
capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86).
Lev Vygotsky views interaction with peers as an effective way of developing skills and strategies. He
suggests that teachers use cooperative learning exercises where less competent children develop with
help from more skillful peers - within the zone of proximal development.
Vygotsky believed that when a student is in the ZPD for a particular task, providing the appropriate
assistance will give the student enough of a "boost" to achieve the task.

The ZPD has become synonymous in the literature with the term scaffolding. However, it is important to note that
Vygotsky never used this term in his writing, and it was introduced by Wood et al. (1976). Once the student, with the
benefit of scaffolding, masters the task, the scaffolding can then be removed and the student will then be able to
complete the task again on his own.

Wood et al. (1976, p. 90) offer the following definition ofscaffolding:

'Those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learners capacity, thus permitting him to
concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence'.
It is important to note that the terms cooperative learning, scaffolding and guided learning all have the
same meaning within the literature.

Zone of Proximal Development Example

Maria just entered college this semester and decided to take an introductory tennis course. Her class
spends each week learning and practicing a different shot. Weeks go by and they learn how to properly
serve and hit a backhand. During the week of learning the forehand, the instructor notices that Maria is
very frustrated because she keeps hitting her forehand shots either into the net or far past the baseline.
He examines her preparation and swing. He notices that her stance is perfect, she prepares early, she
turns her torso appropriately, and she hits the ball at precisely the right height. However, he notices that
she is still gripping her racquet the same way she hits her backhand, so he goes over to her and shows
her how to reposition her hand to hit a proper forehand, stressing that she should keep her index finger
parallel to the racquet. He models a good forehand for her, and then assists her in changing her grip.
With a little practice, Maria's forehand turns into a formidable weapon for her!
In this case, Maria was in the zone of proximal development for successfully hitting a forehand shot. She
was doing everything else correctly, but just needed a little coaching and scaffolding from a "More
Knowledgeable Other" to help her succeed in this task. When that assistance was given, she became
able to achieve her goal. Provided with appropriate support at the right moments, so too will students in
classrooms be able to achieve tasks that would otherwise be too difficult for them.

Social Interaction
In sociology, social interaction is a dynamic sequence of social actions between individuals (or groups) who modify their
actions and reactions due to actions by their interaction partner(s). Social interactions can be differentiated into
accidental, repeated, regular and regulated.
A social interaction is a social exchange between two or more individuals. These interactions form the basis for social
structure and therefore are a key object of basic social inquiry and analysis. Social interaction can be studied between
groups of two (dyads), three (triads) or larger social groups.

Social structures and cultures are founded upon social interactions. By interacting with one another, people design
rules, institutions and systems within which they seek to live. Symbols are used to communicate the expectations of a
given society to those new to it, either children or outsiders. Through this broad schema of social development, one sees
how social interaction lies at its core.
The empirical study of social interaction is one of the subjects of microsociology, which concerns the nature of everyday
human social interactions and agency on a small scale. Methods
include symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, as well as later academic sub-divisions and studies like
psychosocial studies, conversational analysis and human-computer interaction.
With symbolic interactionism, reality is seen as social, developed interaction with others. It argues that both individuals
and society cannot be separated far from each other for two reasons. One being that they are both created through
social interaction. The second reason is they cannot be understood in terms without the other. Ethnomethodology, an
offshoot of symbolic interactionism, which questions how people's interactions can create the illusion of a shared social
order despite not understanding each other fully and having differing perspectives.

Irreversibility
Irreversibility is a stage in early child development in which a child falsely believes that actions
cannot be reversed or undone. For example, if a three-year-old boy sees someone flatten a
ball of play dough, he will not understand that the dough can easily be reformed into a ball.
Children typically develop past this stage by age 7.