DRE Learning Lab
Have Fun and Learn Online
DRE Learning Lab
We live in times of great change, and more and more children and young people lose interest in learning. Social media saturates the lives of both children and adults, multi-screen living, and digital social culture are surreptitiously changing our brains. In the 21st century, when both the form and content of children’s learning becomes more and more abundant, correspondingly, their concentration and motivation to learn has declined.
DRE’s Learning Lab is an innovative approach to learning which helps children to establish the connection between learning and themselves and their experience online. We aim to help them fully understand the content under exploration and enjoy the learning process while doing it in order to achieve more with satisfaction and become more confident, positive learners under DRE Learning Lab.
Create Fictional Contexts
DRE’s Learning Lab uses dramatic fictional contexts online created with our teacher-facilitators. Children apply all the knowledge they have gained, academic or experiential, from school or family to these carefully structured contexts, through practice rather than simply recalling from memory. Moreover, by encoding learning in practical tasks in socially constructed fictional situations with their peers, children engage and understand more. They take ownership of their learning and apply it in order to solve problems for themselves and each other.
Fictional Contexts Heighten Learning
DRE’s Learning Lab uses drama in education methodology to work with the children, in particular the “commission model”. This approach to learning starts from ‘real’ practice. The children are commissioned in a fictional context to solve a problem or meet a need for a community of interest. They are framed, often in role, as experts within the drama. With the support of our teacher-facilitators the children research, organize, inquire, share, transfer and coordinate the content of their own learning in order to fulfill the commission. They begin to learn how to exert control over their learning, improving competences including learning to learn!
Inquiry Learning
In a truly liberated environment, free from the limitations of standardised learning, DRE’s Learning Lab is a platform for the discussion, expression and sharing of ideas. The environment is structured to engage active thinking and extend the capacity to learn through the process of analyzing problems, finding different paths to solving problems. The aim is to fully connect to each child’s lived experience while simultaneously nurturing thinking through doing, through practice and reflecting on and analysing practice. Through doing this we aim to provoke the child’s curiosity, stimulate the drive to actively explore, seek information, and cultivate inquiry learning skills and habits.
Social learning
DRE’s Learning Lab provides a social learning model for six-person learning groups, which fully benefits from the exchange of experience between children from different backgrounds; a productive collision of ideas, collectively negotiated and communicated through peer learning guided by skilled teacher-facilitators. Each group of six are appointed to solve a real life problem in a fictional drama situation. This aids socialization, emotional development, empathy and so on. In the process of learning, sharing and acknowledging feeling as well thinking between peers helps children develop a long-term capacity for self-regulated socially integrated learning.
Full use of language
DRE’s Learning Lab will bring positive interaction into the online ‘classroom’. The children’s own ideas and the expression of them are given full attention and in return form an important part of the solution to the problem they explore in the fictional context. This online laboratory ‘classroom’ will redefine children’s learning. There will be space for the full use and expression of the children’s language, but there will also be an emphasis on developing the ability, and the habit, of listening to peers in what is a truly dialogical virtual space.
Language is the core competence of children’s development and occupies a critical position in the learning process. The application and the expression of their own ideas in their own language is largely ignored in mainstream school culture. This means that many children with real linguistic potential are not given the space to express and develop their talent which leads to a repression of that potential.
DRE Learning Lab is an online course for children aged 5-11, including (5-7 age group, 7-9 age group and 9-11 age group). Interactive live-streaming classes are designed for small groups of 6 children. One session has 8 weeks 16 classes at 19:00-20:00 on two weekday evening.
For details, consult with Ms. Wanjun +86-15701039903 about DRE Learning Lab.