The Times They Are A Changing

The times they are a changing and I am learning so much! I’ve so many new techniques about how my students learn in the classroom. One of the best parts I learned about in this class is how people learn. Experience, hands-on, working in cooperative teams these are ways people learn and more important, how they remember! Incorporating newer technologies like blogs, Smartboards, wikis are tangible, hands-on learning for my students to use today. I think perhaps my favorite new learning technology was VoiceThread. An application that allows one to build a PowerPoint style presentation but then others can also log in and make comments as well…sorta like PowerPoint meets a wiki…a very cool way to get the conversations going.


And so…here it is…another class has come to an end and I come away with more tricks in my teacher bag to help my kids become the best that they can be!

Voice Thread

Hi Everyone!  Hope you are having a great week!  Please check out my VoiceThread link...enjoy! 

http://voicethread.com/share/775920/

Shayne

We Remember What We Teach

Being a reading teacher, I am completely for the idea that social learning is the primary way people construct meaning. However, too few classrooms in my building use this teaching style. The areas in my school that I see this most used is in our social studies classrooms. In the guided reading classroom, each week we learn a new strategy to become better readers. For example this week we are looking at text to text, text to self and text to world connections in reading. By the end of the school year my students have pockets full of strategies and know when to pull them out to use them. Often I will pair up my students, sometimes one lower and one higher reader or sometimes both will be low or high and they read out loud to each other. When one struggles with a word or passage the other student’s job is to suggest a strategy that might be helpful. When they have to ‘teach’ the strategies to each other, they usually understand them and how to use them.


Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn, & Malenoski stated “the instructional strategy of cooperative learning focuses on having student interact with each other in groups in ways that enhance their learning” (pp 139). When students interact with each other and teach each other key strategies for success, learning is remembered and students know how to apply what they have learned.

Constructivism Through Technology

As a reading teacher, one of the ways I like to incorporate constructivism through technology is through book reviews. Many times as a classroom reading teacher I go to web sites to find suggestions for books, content matter, reading levels, ect. I often ask my students to pretend that they work for Barnes and Noble and that they have to write a review of the book we just read. They have to tell whether they liked it, would suggest it to others, and give a short plot summary…without giving away the story, just like we read online. However, I always have them write these reviews up in their journals but why not have them work up their reviews in a word document and then past to a website like barnesandnoble.com to the readers review section. They could see their very own work on a real website; which could be helpful to someone else deciding on that book.

Cognitivism in Practice...can you smell the learning?

The class that I teach, Guided Reading, walks students who are struggling with literacy through many strategies that help them to become more fluent readers who understand what they read. One of the very first, almost primary strategies we teach is chunking. Chunking is breaking words in to smaller parts often were syllable breaks naturally occur. Although this concept is very elementary for a struggling secondary reader it can be tricky. One of the ways that I help students to ‘experience’ chunking is to keep a small white board on my reading table; when a student comes to a word that they cannot read, I give them the white board and have them guide us a through a mini lesson on chunking that word.

It is through the use of technology, of using concept mapping and advanced organizers that help students make connections and to remember. We have to remember that kids need to hear several times, see it too, use effective graphics, give them experiences.  If we roll more of these concepts into our everday teaching, our students will have a richer educational experience.

Behaviorist Learning Theories

In my own classroom I extensively use the behaviorist learning theory with classroom management. It lends itself perfectly and frankly most behaviors take place because there is some sort of reaction either positive or negative.




Our school district has used connected math a math program where there is not a lot of practice and drill. Kids are introduced to larger concepts and then use a lot of self discovery. It is obvious to me that this approach with math does not work because too many of my students come to seventh grade and do not know things like multiplication tables and basics formulas simply because they didn’t get any ‘drill and kill’ with these essential facts. I think certainly behaviorist theories work well in the math classroom. Anything really that has to list a set of instructions or use an ordered set of procedures. Some things just need rote practice to become more fully learned. Often as teachers in my district we will use online tutorials to increase our computer skills or when learning a new computer program. I think as teachers we all use different learning theories in our classrooms and the behaviorist theory has its place.

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