Children should be allowed to move around the classroom and to work against a background of chatter as classmates exchange ideas, a leading US academic has recommended.
Angeline Lillard, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, said that too many schools were still clinging to a traditional “factory model” of the classroom in which children sitting silently in ranks were considered blank sheets on which teachers could imprint knowledge merely by talking to them.
Professor Lillard said that this approach ran counter to everything that psychologists had discovered in the past hundred years about how children learn.
“We were designed in nature to think about the world in relation to how we physically interact with it - it’s called embodied cognition. So it’s only natural that children learn better when they get to move,” she said.
“If you ask children to pick out pairs of animals that might go together, they will remember the pairs that they are allowed to touch and move, rather than the ones they just look at,” she said.
In maths or physics, handling or building geometrical models helps students to understand the laws behind them. In history, role-play enables children to get an understanding of the motivation of leading figures.
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