Tonight we started CEDO 525 and our first reading assignment was to read the Principles of Teaching and Learning website. You can access it right here
The website was split up into 2 different sections, one dealing with learning principles and another that dealt with teaching principles. Here is a paraphrasing of what the sections talked about.
I. Learning Principles
1. Students prior knowledge will impact their learning
2. Organization impacts learning
3. Student Motivation guides learning
4. Scaffolding is important
5. Feedback and Goal Setting is important
6. Emotions can hinder or enhance learning
7. Metacognition and autonomy are the keys to students becoming self-directed learners
II. Teaching Principles
1. Lessons must be crafted to fit your specific students
2. There are 3 major components of instruction: Learning Objectives, Assessments & Instructional Activities
3. Be explicit in your expectations
4. Prioritize knowledge and skills for your students
5. Know your content weaknesses
6. Know your role as a teacher
7. Reflect, Refine and Revamp your lessons each year
This article was a fairly interesting one. I have been modifying ASU's modeling program from my physics classes and I am happy to say that it matches up fairly well with the learning principles. The program tries to deal with preconceptions in science by showing students events and having the students try to explain them through designing lab experiments. Now there is a lot of different scaffolding that has to occur and the students are resistant to the program at first, but it has given me some great gains in academic progress.
I really like the approach that takes this lesson beyond cursory knowledge and has them do some experimentation and analysis. It is shocking how much so-called knowledge we cannot recall because we never learned it in context or studied it in depth.
ReplyDeleteAs a classroom teacher, do you feel that you can apply these principles, or are there practical impediments that would be impossible to overcome?