The Leonardo Effect

We remove the barriers to learning, allowing children to re-discover and develop a hunger for knowledge.

Leonardo Effect, (2011)

The Leonardo effect is a type of interdisciplinary teaching method which merges science and art to facilitate children to accomplish their bursting potential educationally. This teaching approach allows the children to expand on their ideas creatively and to develop into a confident individual as teammates and provider. While allowing the children to enquire freely, this allows the teachers to be further creative and impressionable in the classroom enabling the lesson to be engaging, especially in the curricula as the children are able to connect across the learning landscape.

The philosophy of The Leonardo Effect: Teaching creatively in the curriculum

Leonardo Da Vinci
(Derived from www.leonardoeffect.com)

Leonardo da Vinci influenced a child’s inquisitiveness and enquired the whole thing. Da Vinci was certain that consuming entirely of the senses in direct investigations to be crucial in his development of notions. The Leonardo effect have discovered that when children are offered the opportunity to carry out a similar method, it opens their possible of learning and also provide the children a desire for learning and make teaching more refreshing and significant task.

There are four stages of approach that has been tested and validated, that enables pupils of all aptitudes to have the right to learn and exceed high levels set by the old fashioned learning approaches. These four teaching methodology entails:

1) Capturing imagination in children.

This consists of using direct experiences in applicable settings to motivate self-generated enquiry. When capturing on children’s characteristic interest, a procedure of discovery learning commence involving exploration with different materials such as books. The pupils tend to sense empowerment and the teachers tend to feel motivated to learn with them.

2) DevelopmentChildren deeply discover, expand on ideas and carry out experiments through looking, listening and doing something. This open stage allows children to make links, illustrating out the learning procedure to ease learning ability development, including skills, knowledge and understanding.

3) Creation

As a task, children are expected to apply their skills and knowledge in an inventive and creative context, this lead their learning to an advanced level, surpassing traditional curricular requirements.

4) Reflection and Communication

In this stage, children go back onto their own work to evaluate and connect their knowledge to a wider audience in school, or go on board on a different learning journey stimulated by the new skills and knowledge that they have assimilated.

Recently in one of my university seminars, our lecturer had put us into groups of 4 and gave each group an element which was water, earth, fire, and air. We were given 'water'. The group task was to write down as many word association as we think can think of in 5 minutes, once 5 minutes was up the groups would change over and replicate the task, as the activity went it prove more difficult as the words association we could think of was written down already by another group, this gave us no choice but to really think outside the box to associate with the element.

Once the task had ended, the lecturer then asked us to choose one word association from our original element (i.e. water), and have asked us to prepare a visual short presentation based on the word association we have chosen. As a group, we chose‘tsunami’, as we have realised

that we actually did not know what causes the tsunami to occur, this have aroused our interests as we have found ourselves asking the usual questions such as ‘what’ and ‘why’. We have planned how to set out our presentation and researched thoroughly. I found this approach very enjoyable, and made me understood more about the Leonardo Effect as I have got to experience it.

Referencea

Leonardo Effect, 2011. What It Is. [Online]
Available at: http://www.leonardoeffect.com/connecting_learning_to_hard_to_reach_children.html
[Accessed 10.7.2015].