In order to understand my teaching of history, you have to understand my personal teaching philosophy. I believe that all children are entitled to an education of their mind, body, and soul. In my opinion, once a person goes into the field of education, he takes on the responsibility of supporting cognitive, physical, and affective growth of all children that he encounters. I agree with Bandura when he says “Learning can be done through observation as well as through experience”.
For me, experience is just as, if not more important than modeling. According to John Dewey “Existence is experience”; I completely agree with this idea. We learn many things through experience, even things that we are not aware of. This works well with most of the subjects taught in an elementary school, however, when applied to history, it is hard to have them experience what has already happened in the past. Hard, but not impossible with the technology we have today.I found it very interesting that I had quoted Dewey in that write up, and didn't even remember it when I was working on the top ten list and researching Dewey and the lab school. As our school is very big on Project-based learning, I think I really do connect best with Constructivism, even if it isn't a "Theory of Learning". When I wrote up my philosophy of teaching, I reflected that I felt most of my students learned best when they were able to experience the concept. I also thought it was interesting that I mentioned technology when talking about the different ways we can give students the experiences (especially for history, until the invent a time machine).
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
How People Learn
If there was one set way that people learned and I figured that out and marketed it, I would be richer than Bill Gates. However, I am a firm believer that how people learn is a very individual thing, although there are large clumps of people that learn in similar ways. Before I logged on to write this blog, I reread a teaching philosophy that I had written two years ago when I was nominated for a teaching award. In part, I wrote
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4 comments:
Good post. You made me realize that I pretty much left out the individual nature of the learning experience in my post.
That's probably why there are so many learning theories - there is no one size fits all. I have done a lot of learning through observation and experience.
I agree that each person has a different way of learning and some of those ways are similar to others. Experience is very important in the learning process. This is my fifth year teaching fourth grade and I finally feel like I have enough experience in the classroom to make me a successful teacher.
I agree with you--experience helps tremendously with learning. But it isn't everything. Take for example, you said you had heard of Dewey before but didn't remember it in the reading. But I am sure having been exposed to his concepts before it was easier to understand them this time.
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