As a newly graduated teacher I have to declare a lack of teaching experience and no library experience at all. However, here's my take on resource-based learning.
As a Design and Technology (Food and Textiles) teacher [ok we'll call it Home Economics for simplicity] I find that in a way I have been mentally prepared for RBL. A key component of our teaching is being able to multitask the different designs/recipes/techniques, etc. that students choose to and/or must undertake. Part of this has to do with Quality Teaching and student's having input into their learning as well as nurturing their creativity.
I
think that this correlates well with RBL in that students have some direction into where their learning takes them. This for the teacher and TL means that they must be able to multitask overseeing the different topics/paths that students choose to take. On saying this there are often restrictions/limits on the scope of choices students have in Textiles and Food Technology assignments and it appears to be the same for RBL. (After all who wants to create a marking criteria that covers 30 totally different assignments – although possible it is time consuming).
As a Home Ec teacher I am looking forward to incorporating RBL into my teaching skills repertoire. Much of what I have taught has been through RBT – structuring the content to be learnt and delivering it through a teacher-centred approach. At times this was done to maintain my sanity when giving students a base design/recipe to work off, ensuring curriculum content and skills were covered, and making sure OH&S was maintained. RBL will provide me with a method of teaching that I am sure will benefit all my students. It will be great for theory assignments as students can take responsibility for their own learning. It might also provide me with a bit of a break as students utilise other resources than the teacher. Hopefully this will mean that I can focus on information literacy and the process of completing an assignment while content can take a little bit of a backseat until it is time for marking.
As well as this RBL will benefit students and the teacher as there is theoretically the possibility of covering more content than often we have time for. Depending on how time is structured at your school and divided between the different disciplines you may only have two to four lessons a week face to face with students. In Food Technology we lose at least two lessons a week to practicals – a demonstration lesson and a practical lesson. In Textiles it is sometimes more than this that is spent on practical lessons. This means that we have only two lessons a week (hopefully more) to cover content. By utilising RBL teachers can set assignments through which content can be covered outside of face-to-face lessons (and yes book classes into the library in class time to ensure access to a wide range of resources other than the internet – however you would/may only need a few every so often to check on student’s progress).
I think at this point I will stop as it has become quite a long post although hopefully relevant. However I would like to add that the advent of new technologies has changed the nature of RBL as I find that students limit themselves in the resources that they use. Although there are online databases, online magazines and journals, and so on students generally limit themselves to a Google search on any subject. With the advent of technology and the expanding nature of resources it appears that we are becoming more confined by our own choices in the resources that we use.
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