The Roadmap for Innovating Sarawak Educational Landscape: Design of Learning Environment for 21 st

Century Learning

INTRODUCTION

The challenging world in the 21st century has demanded the need for the design of learning
environment to cater for the changes in the educational goals and expectations for the 21 st Century
Learning. The four critical areas for development of 21st Century skills are collaboration and teamwork,
creativity and imagination, critical thinking and problem solving. Therefore the learning environment
needs to be designed in such a way to enable the four critical skills to be attended to.

FOUR PERSPECTIVE OF EFFECTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

First of all, let’s look at the four important perspectives to help guide the design of effective learning
environments.

Learner-centered Environment

Learning is enhanced when teachers know their learners, pay attention to the knowledge and cultural
beliefs that the learners bring to the classroom and use this knowledge as a starting point for new
instruction and monitor students’ changing conceptions as instruction proceeds. For example, students
are reading stories in which the character is of their similar cultural background where they can better
identify the character. However, I believe teachers are doing too many learning tasks for the students.
We ask questions, we add details to their answers, we offer the examples and we give them the content
to memorize. In contrast, students will need to be given chance to practice in order to develop their
learning skills. When teachers make all the decisions, the motivations to learn decreases and learners
become dependent. This situation will inhibit them to be creative and critically thinking.

Knowledge-centered Environment

Knowledge-centered environment occurs when teachers are focused on strategies that develop their
students’ learning with understanding. Teachers in these classrooms help their teachers to be
metacognitive and think about how they are thinking to solve problems. Students need to be able to
apply their understanding to a variety of different context too. Teachers need to consider their students’
prior knowledge and make sure that students are connecting what they have previously learned with
what they are attempting to learn. I think the existing curricular in Malaysian Education requires critical
analysis to enhance the knowledge-centered environment because it is too packed and this restricts
students to go for in-depth understanding.

Assessment-centered Environment

Effectively designed learning environment must also give opportunities for feedback through formative
and summative assessments. However, in many classrooms, most teachers’ feedbacks are grades on test
papers and report cards intended to measure the results of learning. Less is done to measure how
learning is progressing and how to improve on how students can learn better. However, we cannot
blame the teachers because the education system, school administrators, parents and community
model effective learning through good grades in year-end and national exam. This is a challenge for the
teachers in implementing a good assessment system. The common example that we can relate to is the
TIMMS and PISA where students with good grades in public examination appeared did not really able to
solve ‘real-life problems’ because our assessment system is more on memorizing mathematical
procedures that typically appeared in the examination.

Community-centered Environment

The foundation of a community-centered environment is the fostering of explicit values or norms that
promote learning. An example would be students feeling confident to ask questions and not being afraid
to say, “I don’t know”. This is in contrast in the classroom with a norm of “don’t get caught not knowing
something”. This norm would definitely discourage students to ask questions. The classroom’s culture
needs to be nurtured to promote collaboration instead of the competitive learning environment.

Although the perspectives are discussed separately, they need to be aligned as interconnected
components that support one another. Learning designers need to coordinate between what is need to
be taught, how it is taught and how it is assessed and it must also be aligned with the goals and
assessment practice of the community.

PRINCIPLES OF INNOVATIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Every educator wants to create environment that will foster students’ love of learning. The main goal is
to develop self-directed learners. It is denied that mastery is important and that students need to learn
age-appropriate content, but it is equally important to develop students’ ability to go beyond that, to
question and apply learning in new situations.
Based on the four perspective discussed earlier, these are the seven principles of Innovative Learning
Environment

1. To make learning and learner engagement central.

Learners have to be at the center of what happens in the classroom which activities focused on
their cognition and growth. They have to actively engage in learning in order to become self-
regulated learners who are able to control their emotions and motivations during the study
process, set their goals and monitor their own learning process.

2. Ensure that learning is social and often collaborative.

Learning is a social practice and cannot happen alone. By our nature we are social beings and we
learn by interacting. We learn by pulling and pushing on concepts with one another. Structured,
collaborative group work can be good for all learners of different intelligent and varies learning
styles.

3. Be highly attuned to learners’ motivations and the importance of emotions.

The power of emotions and motivation in the classroom are well documented but often
overlooked because they are ‘soft’. Still, most teachers know that if a student is upset about
something that happened at home or in school, he would not learn well. Similarly, keeping
students motivated should be the starting point of learning. If students understand why it
matters, learning becomes more important to them.

4. Be acutely sensitive to individual difference including in prior knowledge.

Learners are different and innovative learning environment need to reflect the various
experiences and prior knowledge that the learners bring to the class.

5. Be demanding for each learner but without excessive overload.

Students need to be stretched but not too much. Educators should try to prevent both academic
success and the challenge of discovery. In a diverse classroom group work can help achieve this
as students at different levels help one another.
 6. Use assessment consistent with its aims with strong emphasis on formative feedback.
Assessment should be for learning, not of learning. Yes, assessments are important, but only to
determine how to structure the next lesson for maximum effectiveness. It should be
meaningful, substantial, and shape the learning itself. When it is done well and more formally,
teachers can collect feedback on the learning pathway and it drives the next step in teaching
and learning.

7. Promote horizontal connectedness across activities and subjects in and out of the school.
Learning needs to be connected across disciplines and reach out the real world. Learning cannot
be meaningful if students do not understand why the knowledge will be useful to them, how it
can be applied in life. Understanding the connections between subjects and ideas is essential for
the ability to transfer skills and adapt.

IMPLEMENTING THE PRINCIPLES IN SARAWAK EDUCATIONAL LANDSCAPE

Many of the seven principles of Innovative Learning Environment outlines are second nature to
good teachers, but they can feel hard to achieve within our education system that are slow-moving,
bureaucratic and resistant to change. However, there are still ways for teachers who want to create an
innovative learning environment to begin down the path, even without the full support of their
colleagues and administration. It is also hope that the shifting to the new curriculum standard (KSSR and
KSSM) and the integration of emerging technologies could offer openings for building in these practices.

Everyone knows the common barriers educators face such as the school culture, the students
and themselves. However, with some reflection, professional learning community and problem solving,
teachers can often begin to work around these barriers. What more if the school culture does not
encourage implementation, educators can mitigate negative reaction by framing the ideas in a way that
will be accepted, or by bringing in resources to try and convince naysayers. Educators can also test ideas
with students before implementing them. Students have been indoctrinated into the same educational
mindset about what makes a useful education as everyone else, and some might be resistant to new
teaching methodologies.

Here, in Learning Sciences programs, the participants are introduced to an emerging

interdisciplinary field that investigates how people learn through interaction with objects and people in
their environment. To create meaningful innovation of learning environment, the learning scientists
learn to design the environment through design-thinking process where they need to empathize, define
the problem, ideate, prototype and then test the ideas of innovative learning environment.