What Is AVM?
AVM stands for Apptessence Video Mentor. It’s a package of lessons and resources that mutually reinforce the student’s ability to self-direct their learning.
But it’s also a methodology for organizing learning experiences, centred on the dynamics between students at different scales, from individual, to pair learning, to team sharing of discoveries, to the larger classroom relationship between students and instructors.
Paired Learning
Paired learning is a staple of software development. Two people interoct around a workstation to analyze, explore solutions, develop theses in response to challenges, and formulate strategies to test these ideas in practical contexts related the the project at hand.
In AVM, students always are paired, but the pairs can change from class to class. By doing so, students don’t get trapped in a dynamic that may not challenge them, and pairs always split control of mouse and keyboard, to instantiate mutually agreed upon solutions.
Challenge-Based
In each lesson, multiple Challenges are set for the students to work through. These are presented in the form of simple statements that relate to the video content that the Challenge provides. The students learn that everything is contextual, and the statements become meaningful when the challenge videos run.
Within a challenge, students see a series of short videos that each focus on a single technique. A Focus statement clarifies exactly what they are to identify among the series of videos. Generally, this means that while the set of videos relates to the original statement,, the Focus clarifies exactly which video and technique is of interest to them.
Student-Centric
A quick look at the classroom photo tells the story: The teacher (standing) is there primarily to observe the progress in the class. When an insoluble problem arises (rarely), and the class doesn’t find a solution as a whole group, the instructor may step in to provide hints and guidance.
Collaborative and Interdependent
In our classrooms, pairs of students are grouped into teams of 6. In a typical class, there would be 2 such teams, for a total of 12 students. The key to the Focus statements referred to, is that each student in a team of six sees the same videos in a loop for a given Challenge. But each pair sees a different Focus statement.
In other words, each pair of students has their own mission within the challenge, a different video that they must identify to meet the Challenge. The key dynamic in AVM, is that at the end of each Challenge, each pair has identified a key technique that the other two have not.
This makes the next step for each pair to direct the other two pairs in their team on what they’ve discovered, leading them through the steps to master that technique. In this way, all learning is collaborative, and interdependent. And culminating projects along the way require that all the techniques be used, so each students plays a key role in the successful mastery by the others in their team