My Personal Learning Theory

Six weeks ago, I was asked to write a paper on my personal learning theory.  Now, after completing my class on learning and instructional theories, I have had time to reflect and expand on my original beliefs.

It has been my experience that students learn by finding personal connections to the material that is being taught. Specifically, our minds are designed to recognize and understand patterns. Throughout our life, we gather events and facts that are relevant to our experiences. In school, it is our responsibility to help our students see how the information we are presenting to them is similar to the information they already know. We must also help them connect it to their personal experiences.

This is what I had to say a month and a half ago.  I now realize that my learning theory was heavily influenced by cognitive learning theory, primarily because that is how I have always have taught and been taught in this style.  I was aware of behaviorism at the time, but tended to disregard it as an effective teaching style because of some negative experiences I had at a school that focused on Skinners' theories.  I now feel that I incorporated some of the more effective aspects of behaviorism in my classroom, specifically recognition and positive feedback, without being consciously aware that I was doing it.

I realized that my theory did not benefit all of my students, but I wasn't exactly sure where to go with them.

There are still many techniques that I can add to my classroom to assist with my students’ understanding. For instance, I do not feel like I do enough with kinesthetic learners in my classroom. I feel that I can incorporate tactile and mobile activities in my classroom. I would like to do more things to help them relate math knowledge to their personal learning styles. I hope to begin using these techniques soon, and hope that they will be well received by my students.

I now have more ideas about what I can do with these students based off of my understanding of constructivism.  In my high school physics class, we did a project called "mouse trap race car."  We had to make a vehicle that would run on the energy provided by a mouse trap.  The winning team was the one who got their car to go the farthest.  While my group didn't do too well, the assignment has stuck with me years later.  Doing things like this that provide artifacts for my students will help the kinesthetic learners in my class.

I have also been wanting to incorporate social technology into my classroom.  Blogs and wikis have proven their use to me as a learning tool, and I want to make them an integral part of my classroom.  After learning about social constructionist theory, I understand why these tools can be so useful in the classroom, letting the students develop their own understanding of the world together.  VoiceStream also is useful for sharing their creations with the rest of the class and discussing it with each other and the teacher.

I still feel that cognitive learning theory is going to be the base for my classroom. But I have a stronger grasp of other learning theories and understand where and when I should be using them to increase the educational potential of my assignments.  It will take a lot of time and effort to be able to incorporate these effectively into the classroom, but it is worth it to give my students all of the opportunities I can.  I plan on making my school web page a primary resource for my students, and will spend most of my summer updating the page to make it easy for my students to use.  I will start a class discussion forum on the page, and lead the students by example from the beginning of the school year.