When it comes to teaching, I am a firm believer that you cannot just settle on one approach to instruction. With the multiple learning theories out there, there have been thousand of hours of research that have gone into testing these theories. The fact that many are all still around shows that their are people that respond favorably to each of them. However, it is my personal experience as an educator that confirms this. As I went through each theory, I could think back to a numerous students that I saw learn best from each specific theory (or several). I know that as a teacher, in order to reach as many of my students as I can, I need to design my instruction around the practices from a variety of theories.
When I would teach students with lower ability levels, I saw them find success when I taught with strategies based in Behaviorism. They needed the constant affirmation and the whole process broken into small attainable tasks. I think of the used of Study Island in my classroom where students were rewarded with a short game after each correct answer and how many found success in that. In reference to Cognitivism, I have seen almost all of my students benefit from Dual Coding and Information Processing Theory. I have also see students have difficulty retaining information when the amount is too great or it is always presented in just one type of media. I am a huge supporter of Constructivism. I would teach inquiry-based science, allowing students to come up with questions and create their own experiments to solve them. I also am really big on letting my students know why they need to learn something. When instruction is presented in a a real-world context, they can see why. My knowledge of the Zone of Proximal Development was also utilized as I clustered students together for group work, and I always did my best to allow my lessons to be presented in a variety of ways.
While I see the benefits of all of the learning theories and I do try my best to take advantage of as many as I can, I find myself leaning mostly towards Constructivism, Social Cognition, and Multiple Intelligences Theory. I would always allow my students to collaborate in groups, create lessons with real world application, and present information using a variety of media to meet a large number of the intelligences.
3 comments:
I think that we all adopt a hodge-podge of different approaches based on the available theories in order to ensure we reach as many people as possible.
I am a huge supporter of multiple intelligences as well. I also use a lot of discovery learning in science. We as teachers can let the reigns go a little and see what happens.
Love the title! Your comment about presenting info in smaller pieces is very profound. Sometimes we think a certain theory did/did not work when sometimes it is the volume of information we are trying to teach.
Post a Comment