Personal Learning Theory...

What? In the quiz about our Emerging Theory of Teaching and Learning, I scored the highest in cognitivism but humanism and behaviorism came a close second and third. This tells me that even though cognitivism might be my strongest I believe in all three when it comes to teaching and learning. I do agree that prior knowledge and beliefs play a major role in the meaning that students construct and that people take separate pieces of information and use it to create an understanding. I believe children learn best when they are in a comfortable and safe environment that fosters learning by giving opportunities for experimentation and offers open communication. Students also learn best when they can relate new knowledge to old information and when the information is relevant to their world which is part of the meaningful learning process. I believe that children also learn better when there are classroom agreements that require reinforcement and that stays aways from any punishments. It is also important that students have a chance to work together in groups and to observe each other as part of social cognitive learning.

So What? There are many ways that the cognitive theory will impact my classroom. As a teacher and as a learner I will encourage students to find a way that they can remember the material that is being taught to them. For example, using a mnemonic to help the students in memory retrieval of a certain subject or lesson. Also, I strongly believe in kinesthetic activities where the students have to use movement to express themselves. I think these activities can help the storage and encoding process. For example, in class Dr. Cox had the students act out the water cycle using our bodies. Now, if she would have just told me about the water cycle I would have forgotten it in about five minutes but using a different strategy helped to encode it into my long-term memory. In addition, in my classroom I will be finding ways of relating new material to prior knowledge (assimilation) because I believe it also helps students to remember more. This can easily be accomplished with just a little extra time before starting a new lesson by reminding the students of their prior knowledge and how the new knowledge connects with it. Also, by having students question what they are learning or reading is a simple way for students to make sense of the topics they are studying.

Now What? There are many steps I need to take to improve my understanding of how students learn and efficient ways of teaching the knowledge to them. I feel like I need more experience in teaching fun, engaging activities to students that gets the knowledge into their long-term memory where they can use some of the Bloom's higher taxonomy levels to show their understanding of that subject. I would like to learn more about constructivism specifically how to include this learning theory into my teaching more often. A great step in reaching that goal would be to find out if there is additional reading material on teaching with constructivism. Also, it would be great if there was additional training or course on educational psychology because there is new information to learn all the time. Before this class I didn't realize how much went into educational psychology, how important it is when teaching and learning, and how it can help me become a better teacher.