Learn from practice.

These days, students are so happy to be at school. They get to participate in activities celebrating the Lunar New Year, but through these activities outside the classroom, they learn so much about life, things they might not encounter in their daily lives.

Traditional Tet festivals, folk games, how to prepare traditional dishes, the meaning of each custom… students can actually read about them in documents, on the internet, or even see and hear about them through technological applications. But when they experience them in real life, many things become clear. For preschool and elementary school students, these are memorable practical experiences. Students from middle and high school levels don't participate passively but work with their teachers to create activities. Through these events, they learn how to organize, work in teams, and many other skills that are not easily taught in any subject or lesson in the classroom.

Interacting with many high school students, I've noticed that what they're most proud of having learned during their three years of high school isn't just knowledge (which is obvious), but rather maturity, understanding, experience, and skills gained through extracurricular activities like clubs and groups. In recent years, we've become familiar with large-scale cultural and artistic programs and galas, comparable to professional events, all organized entirely by the students themselves. To create such a program, the students have to overcome many obstacles and learn so much, contributing to their growth and development.

For teachers, if they know how to utilize them, activities like these outside the classroom can provide practical knowledge for teaching students. Not only social science subjects like literature, history, geography, economics , and law, but also mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology can draw knowledge and lessons from these practical activities. In this way, knowledge will reach students in a gentle, easy-to-remember, and deeply ingrained manner.

This aligns perfectly with the 2018 General Education Program, which has been implemented over the past five years, shifting its focus from knowledge-based learning to skills-based learning. This shift in teaching methods has led to innovations in testing and evaluation, with exam questions no longer concentrating on academic, textbook-based issues but rather on practical applications. Therefore, many teachers, when guiding students in preparing for the 2025 high school graduation exam (the first to be conducted under the new program), have advised: Instead of rote learning, guessing exam questions, or memorizing academic knowledge, students this year need to change their mindset to understand and apply their knowledge through questions about experiments related to real-world contexts…

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a constant companion for high school and university students, much like Google's search engine once was. Teachers now have to accept the reality that students use AI to solve problems, conduct research, and so on.

Teaching students what to do in a context where most knowledge and solutions in textbooks can be looked up through AI is extremely important. Lessons from life, real-life experiences and emotions, and the necessary skills to solve problems in a VUCA (Volatility - Uncertainty - Complexity - Ambiguity) world are perhaps what educators need to consider.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/hoc-tu-thuc-tien-185250118200558786.htm