Shameless Self Promotion

I am eager to announce that I was recently published in eLearn Magazine.  I wrote this article based off of the experiences I have had in my classroom and through Walden University.  Since I put a link on it back to this blog, I hope that will encourage me to blog on a more regular basis.

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.

Voice Thread

Here is my voicethread url for my school assignment this week.  I think we need more computers and more electronics in our classroom.  This is what is available to us in our urban class.

Social Learning Theories

In social constructivism, students gain knowledge by working with others.  Each member of the group uses their own personal strengths to interpret new information, and then the group as a whole combines each individuals understanding to develop a more detailed understanding of the topic.  In the 21st century, this is an essential theory on a practical level.  With the internet, smart phones, and video conferencing, we no longer need to be in the same country as the people we are collaborating with.  Being able to work together to gain a better understanding of our world is a required skill.

In Using Technology with Classroom Instruction That Works, one instructional strategy that is discussed is cooperative learning.  The techniques that they discuss are perfect examples of how social constructivism can be used in the classroom.  For instance, students can work together on a multimedia project.  Each member of the group will have different strengths and weaknesses.  One may be good at organizing the information.  Another may have visited the area that is being discussed.  Each student working alone would be able to create a project, but by having the students share their strengths and help each other understand the topic, they will both present a better project, and have a deeper understanding of the subject.

Constructionism is Hypothesis Testing

This week, we studied constructionism in our class.  The general idea is that people can grasp knowledge better if they can use it to create something meaningful to themselves.  This is the core of generating and testing hypotheses.  Personally, I learned much of my science and math through generating and testing hypotheses.  Even if our teacher gave us the information, I would have to prove it to myself if I could.  Often, if the subject interested me, I would then continue with the next question that my tests brought up until eventually I would no longer remember what had set me off on the path to start with.

Constructionism can be divided into three sections according to Constructionism, Learning by Design, and Project Based Learning.  These three sections are planning, creating, and processing.  Planning is determining what the question is and information about the topic.  This is the same as generating a hypothesis to test.  In creating, the student documents their experiences, prepares them for presentation, and develop an artifact that can be shared with others.  This combines the second and part of the third step of hypothesis testing.  In hypothesis testing, the second step is to gather data and record results.  The third step of hypothesis testing is to compare the results with what was expected, determine the reason why the finding matched or didn't match the predictions, present your findings, and develop the next hypothesis.  In constructionism, processing involves reflecting on your artifact, and determining where to go from there.  Over all, the two techniques are the same, just separated slightly differently.

Cognitive Theory with Technology

This week, our focus is on cognitive theory.  In simplified terms, cognitive theory is the idea that our brains are like computers.  We have a few things in our short-term (RAM style) memory.  If we feel that these things are important, we save them to our long-term (hard drive) memory.  Then we can access this long-term memory through different connections that we have made to other memories.  We can try to recall things directly (like going through directories on the computer), but it is much easier if we have a short-cut that we have connected to the intended memory (desktop icons).

Much of our current education system makes use of the cognitive learning style.  We have our students look at topics from different angles and different examples in order to help make those connections stronger and more numerous.  Technology can help us provide these different angles and examples.

For example, one strategy that is recommended in "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works" is the use of "cues, questions, and advance organizers".  This is largely a cognitive-style strategy because it focuses on getting students to think about what sort of connections they are going to be able to make to the new topics even before the information is presented.  Graphic organizers are a great use of technology for this.  Students can create a "thought tree" connecting the different things they know.  As they go along in the lesson, they can continue to expand this tree with their new knowledge, and they will have a visual representation of the connections that they have made as well.

As they expand this tree, they move from the area of prior knowledge to the area of new knowledge.  This falls into the strategy of summarizing and note-taking.  Different students have different styles of note-taking that works best for them.  All of these styles, from outlines to thought maps can be done on computers.  And the best part, is that if they are done on a computer, they can be shared on a wiki or a blog or any of a variety of programs, so students can work together and decide whether they have the most important pieces of information.  They can use their notes and the notes and summaries that their classmates have done to help study for their test.  At the same time, the teacher can look over the notes and make sure that the students haven't understood something incorrectly and that they have retained the most important pieces of information.

Behaviorism in the Modern Classroom

There are many learning strategies that are currently being used in our classrooms.  But sometimes the traditional strategies are still effective, even more so with current technologies.  When B. F. Skinner was working on behaviorist theory, he created things like System80 to automate the tasks of reinforcing behavior.  While we have updated the technology, there are many programs that are quite similar on the market today to teach us everything from typing to addition to foreign languages.

In my current class, we have been reading "Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works".  While most of the techniques in the book do not work particularly well with behaviorism, some of them are excellent examples of how it can still be used in the modern classroom.  For instance, one of the strategies that is discussed is reinforcing effort.  Since that is what behaviorism is all about, it is obvious that behaviorist theory would be of use.  However, the focus in the book is on the students understanding and being responsible for their own effort.  The behaviorist strategy of rewarding desired behaviors, in this case effort, is only the first step.  It is important to show how the effort is actually leads to its own rewards like improved test scores.  This way, the student will be encouraged to continue to demonstrate these behaviors in the future.

The second strategy that we looked at is homework.  The purpose of homework is to reinforce the learning that is done in the classroom.  Students should be using it to deepen their understanding.  There are ways that this can be encouraged using behaviorist theory.  For instance, returning homework promptly with comments is an excellent tool for encouraging the students.  There are also ways that technology can assist students while they are doing homework.  For instance, Microsoft Word has a couple of features that can be used by students to improve their writing at home.  The auto summarize and Flesch-Kincaid grade-level rating applications that are now standard can provide immediate feedback on a paper before it is even turned in.

While behaviorism has fallen out of favor in educational theory because it doesn't take into account the emotions or thoughts of the student, it is still useful in some aspects of teaching, specifically when it comes to quick feedback and motivation of our students.