What is learning?
Learning is the ability to take new information, retain or discard, and pigeon-hole it into useful, meaningful, or crap categories.
How can it best be effectuated by a teacher?
This theory teaches us the importance of allowing the students to work out the information as a group and apply it to everyday life situations. However, within the group there needs to be a zone of proximal development, or in other words the ability to participate in group assignments that are challenging their problem-solving skills while at the same time having a capable individual lead the group to discovery. It challenges their skill level and raises their cognitive development.
Adam Cobb, a Preservice director in Boise, Idaho once stated, "Whoever does the work gets the learning." That statement is never truer than after having successfully experienced group work that creates an atmosphere of meaningful learning. When a student can walk out of the classroom and know what s/he needs to do to become a more productive person, then previous schemata morphs into more a meaningful cognition of that particular principle/doctrine.
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AFter laughing over the "crap" category I read on and noted you talked a lot about group work. I didn't really touch on that in my own lesson plan or thoughts but I remember the video was about that group of kids who collabed with each other. they learned a lot about their subjects because they felt like they were adding meaning to the discussions. Plus, the other group members validated their ideas, along with the teacher who also validated, then gave them more to think about.
ReplyDeleteI especially liked the quote about the worker doing the learning. I try to set my students up as the teachers so they get the most out of the lesson. This is hard for me because I wasn't taught this way but I want to learn how.