{"id":15,"date":"2017-03-15T10:54:39","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T15:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/brandonheidt\/?p=15"},"modified":"2017-03-15T10:54:39","modified_gmt":"2017-03-15T15:54:39","slug":"different-ways-to-learn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/brandonheidt\/2017\/03\/15\/different-ways-to-learn\/","title":{"rendered":"Different Ways to Learn"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are many different ways to go about learning. \u00a0Two of the more prevalent approaches are behaviorist and cognitive development.<\/p>\n

Behaviorists believe that people learn best through the behaviors they exhibit. \u00a0These behaviors require reinforcement in order for people to learn them. \u00a0There are two types of reinforcements, positive and negative. \u00a0Positive reinforcement often reward good behavior with a treat, money, or other type of incentive (Woolfolk, 277). \u00a0For instance, if a dog sits, rolls over, or follows directions, they are often given a treat. \u00a0This reinforces that they need to follow directions in order to get rewarded. \u00a0On the other hand, negative reinforcement encourages a behavior by subtracting a stimulus (Woolfolk, 277). \u00a0For instance, if you drive without a seat belt on, there is \u00a0small beeper that keeps going off until you put your seat belt on. \u00a0In order to get rid of the beeping noise you must put your seat belt on, thus reinforcing that you need to drive with your seat belt fastened.<\/p>\n

The other prevalent approach to learning is cognitive development. \u00a0People who use a cognitive approach to learning believe that knowledge and strategies can be learned and eventually changed, which leads to a change in behavior (Woolfolk, 312). \u00a0The big emphasis is on gaining knowledge. \u00a0There are many different ways in which people gain knowledge. \u00a0There is sensory memory which helps us relate information to things that we touch, taste, see, smell, and hear. \u00a0By relating the information to our senses we can pull the information from memory whenever we experience those senses again. \u00a0There is also the working memory. \u00a0the working memory takes new information and combines it with information in long term memory to solve problems (Woolfolk, 319). \u00a0This memory often helps people understand lectures in college or presentations for work. \u00a0The ultimate goal of the cognitive approach is to take new information, process it, and put it in long term memory so that people can draw upon it in the future. \u00a0This often worked best for me in college when I wrote down notes in a notebook during lectures and would type up those notes later on, thus going through the information at least twice.<\/p>\n

Both of these approaches to learning are important in the classroom because every student learns differently. \u00a0Some students act out and don’t behave when in class. \u00a0They need to learn that that behavior is unacceptable, the behaviorist approach can help with developing that. \u00a0Other students learn best by learning out of a book, or having the teacher lecture at them and taking notes, or working in groups. \u00a0The cognitive approach can help teachers narrow down how students learn best and can apply that in the classroom.<\/p>\n

When it comes to teaching history, the area that I’d like to teach, I feel that students learn best by analyzing primary sources and discussing an overall theme to the documents, rather than reading it out of a textbook. \u00a0I also like to incorporate powerpoint presentations into class, so as to give the kids a bullet point list of the main ideas and something visual that they can hold on to. \u00a0Students would also greatly benefit from discussion of the documents to gauge other student’s perspectives. \u00a0This is a very constructivist view of learning. \u00a0Instead of me just telling the students about history, they are learning through reading sources that were actually from that era.<\/p>\n

My O&P teacher uses this approach in his class. \u00a0He is going for his masters and is teaching one class out of a textbook and the other two are using primary sources he provides and discussing over-arching questions about a particular era of US History. \u00a0For instance, one of the questions he had them answer was\u00a0Were African Americans really free after the Civil War?<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>He provided them with documents supported the freedom of African Americans, as well as, denied that African Americans were free. \u00a0He then left it up to the students to decide what was true using text evidence. \u00a0He pulls a lot of these lesson plans from this website\u00a0https:\/\/sheg.stanford.edu\/rlh.<\/p>\n

By understanding how best the students learn, we, as teachers, can adjust our lesson plans so that learning is maximized.<\/p>\n

References:<\/p>\n