‘What are you doing and how are you going to achieve it?’: Shifting Focus to Skill Development in Year 11 Chemistry

Abstract

In the 21st Century, higher order skills and capabilities are the most desirable qualities to industry, supplanting content knowledge as the most critical quality. Furthermore, teachers are always looking at ways to increase student engagement. The Models of Engaged Learning and Teaching (MELT) framework was developed by Willison & O’Regan in order to address these issues (2007; 2018). MELT has been shown to increase student engagement and explicitly develop the skills students required for higher education and employment in industry (McGowan, 2018; Willison, 2018; Willison & O’Regan, 2007). In this study, MELT was implemented in a secondary school in suburban, Adelaide, South Australia. Employing the participant observer methodology, a pre-service teacher undertaking the Master of Teaching program at the University of Adelaide, attended seven, year 11 chemistry lessons and produced a series of vignettes that described student interactions. These were then thematically analysed in order to determine the nature and extent of student demonstrated engagement with and about the MELT framework, and the nature of student classroom interaction with relation to MELT facets and autonomy when MELT is not used explicitly. Furthermore, the study analysed the data in relation to the concept of metacognition, flow and visible thinking routines (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991; Flavell, 1979; Ritchhart & Perkins, 2008). The study illustrated that each of the MELT facets was needed by year 11 secondary school students in the course of each chemistry lesson, and concluded that MELT may support skill development in this context. Furthermore, the study asserts that student engagement and learning may be improved if students and teachers focus on skill development rather than results. Finally, the study recommends that further research be undertaken in relation to MELT’s potential in secondary schools, and suggests that MELT include more emphasis on the affective domain.