Personally significant topic and a new typology of lessons in contemporary education

Abstract

The prerequisites for the present article have been abstracting and moving away from the knowledge-based learning paradigm, creating innovative forms of lessons that carry elements of metadisciplinarity, and the transformation of a set of lessons combined into personally-significant topics into a complete technological complex. A personally significant topic, in its productivity, carries a change in the pupil’s attitude to the world. It is understood as a structural unit of this change. The article offers an invariant structure that includes image, analysis, meaning, action, and reflection, which corresponds to new types of lessons, namely, image lesson, thinking lesson, mood lesson, independent action lesson, as well as actualization and reflection lesson. In general, the proposed set of lessons represents a new technology, whose purpose is to address the subject content to the emotional sphere of pupils, to perceive the value-semantic basis of the topic as conditions for future digital analysis. The methods used included observing the work of the experimental and control classes, test tasks, using the valuable words of the text, and color analysis of emotional expressions. The results of this work have been aimed at improving the quality of pupils’ knowledge, developing ways of thinking, appealing to the value-semantic context of the humanities-based subjects, and embodying the acquired competencies in action situations as the basis for adaptation and socialization of the education subject.

Keywords

• personally significant topic
• image lesson
• mood lesson
• independent action lesson
• actualization and reflection lesson