TEACHING AND LEARNING STRATEGIES FOR THINKING CLASSROOM

In the last class Mina proposed us to create a teaching sequence introducing some of the strategies that can be used in classroom. There are lot of strategies that can be useful in order to make a good and effective class. If we use some strategies in class, we will help children to develop their thinking, to obtain better results, to build their knowledge, to teach them how to organize their work, etc. Some examples of those strategies to work with are: anticipation, building knowledge, consolidation, brainstorming, paired reading and summarizing, etc.

My group was composed by: Pablo, Isabel, Laura, Sara Sánchez and Raúl. We decided to work with brainstorming strategy and we made a science teaching sequence. This strategy consists in generating many ideas about a topic so first students have to look for in their previous knowledge, open their minds and select what ideas are correct and what are not. This strategy can be done by individuals, groups or even the whole class; we work with the three of them. In our group we decided to talk about the topic of ‘energy expenditure’ so we first explained students what a brainstorming is and then we started with the activities. In the first activity children had to discuss with the teacher in which things they save energy, meanwhile the teacher wrote all their answers on the blackboard. In the second activity we divided the class in three groups and we gave one topic to each group (light, paper and water). Each one had to write on a paper one idea to save something related with the topic they had. They had to share in common their ideas of the same group in order not to put the same idea in two papers. Finally in the last activity they had to play a game called ‘Taboo’. Each member of the groups had to explain the idea he or she had written to the rest of the people from the other groups. The difficulty was that they can’t use the words they had written and neither could use mime. At the end of the lesson we asked children what they had learned, why was it important, what they were going to do now that they have a better knowledge, etc. With all these activities all the students have more specific ideas to save water, paper and light and they work brainstorming strategy.

In order to obtain an active learning there should be three phases on each lesson. The first phase is anticipation in which students are asked to answer questions related with the topic they are going to study. With this we can know their previous knowledge and focus their attention on the topic we want to work with. The second phase is building knowledge in which students have to answer their previous questions, propose new ones and also answer them, find out new knowledge and make sense of their thinking. This phase serves to revise what children are learning, identify the main points of the topic and let students to make their personal connections between all the knowledge and information they have. The last phase is consolidation in which teachers want students to reflect on what they have learned, ask what it means to them, the sense of them and what changes have occurred on their process of thinking and learning. The sense of this phase is to summarize the main ideas, make them more specific, share opinions, make personal responses and ask additional questions in order to expand knowledge.

I think these three phases are very important in lessons because without one of them the whole process of learning is not finished so the results are not optimal. At school and high school I have no used to work through the three phases but at university I do. I have realized that I learned more if I start from my previous knowledge, I improve it and learn new one and at the end I summarize what I have learned. Almost all my university teachers told us to analyze our process of learning in blogs, wikis, activities… and this is very useful. 

Curriculum ideologies

There are four different curriculum ideologies to solve in a different way practical problems. So this is how to plan instruction and classes. The four ideologies are:

- The Scholar Academic Ideology

- The Social Efficiency Ideology

- The Learner Centered Ideology

- The Social Reconstruction Ideology

• The Scholar Academic Ideology:

The most important aspects of this ideology are the academic disciplines as a way of teaching for the life, it is very important that children study all the subjects and that they develop their intellect. In the curriculum are established all the subjects with the knowledge children should have. The most important role of education is to preserve all the academic disciplines in order they continue existing in the future so they have to be transmitted to all the population.

People who defend this ideology care about curriculum content more than students’ learning. The role of teachers is to transmit all the disciplines to the children and they finally have to learn all (it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand at all something). In order to see if children have learned and who are the bests, teachers make tests about all the curriculum disciplines.

This is not a correct ideology because they don’t specify why they introduce all those academic disciplines, so they don’t really know what the objective of learning is or for what children are learning. Teachers only transmit their knowledge to students and they learn without thinking what they are learning.

• The Social Efficiency Ideology:

In this ideology the most important idea is to relate the curriculum with what society want. People who defend this ideology want to update the traditional school and all the contents. Educators have to teach students good techniques in order they can make what they are told to do. In schools children should learn how to behave and face the problems of the real life, and also each one have to learn his or her society role. In general this ideology understands the education as a training in which students learn his role in the society in order to be efficient citizens. Education is at the service of society so all the objectives are related with the interests of that society. Students develop into adulthood with teachers’ and educational media’s help. Children who succeed in evaluation are appreciated by the society and those who don’t succeed have to repeat and improve themselves.

This ideology doesn’t work well because it is focused only in society. It doesn’t care about children learning because they only want to transform them into good members of the society.

• The Learner Centered Ideology:

It doesn’t have any relation with the traditional school, this ideology is based on children and their interests. People who defend this ideology assume that children can be responsible of their own development and they decide what they want to learn, educators only guide and help them. Children enjoy classes because they work with interest objects for them and they can be novels and innovative. Children grow through their experiences and different activities. The way of thinking of each child depends on the development stage they are and they pass to the following one by themselves, educators shouldn’t force them to mature. In this ideology is present constructivism and socio-constructivism since children’s development depend on the environment and the people around them. They rarely make tests because each child evolves in a different way, so they evaluate child interests and development individually.

This ideology is good because it focuses on individual children so all of them can develop in the best way as possible.

• The Social Reconstruction Ideology:

This ideology thinks that when children born are not good or bad, they are members of the future society. In this ideology is present socio-constructivist method based on previous knowledge and new experiences. The curriculum should be related with students’ context and with the culture. The learning is a social process not individual so it takes place on schools (through debates, problems analysis, discussions, etc) and outside them. Educators’ role is to reconstruct children and the society in general, they have to understand society problems and be able to analyze and solve them. Knowledge is inside individuals and with it people can be able to improve society. They make subjective evaluations to control students but not to evaluate their knowledge, self-evaluation is also very important.

This ideology let freedom to students develop so it is an interesting ideology and it is also focused on children who are the protagonists of learning process.

Curriculum Ideologies

Focused on

The Scholar Academic Ideology	Academic disciplines
The Social Efficiency Ideology	Society interests
The Learner Centered Ideology	Individual children
The Social Reconstruction Ideology	Reconstruct children

LEARNING THEORIES

We are learning all the time, everyday we learn something new but sometimes we do not realize because is natural and typical for us. We can learn things with the TV, in a conversation with a friend, with a book, a newspaper, a videogame or even going to a restaurant.

In education there are three methods of teaching: behaviourism, constructivism and socio-constructivism. We have to be conscious that students only learn when they are actively participating.

The most common and ancient is the behaviourism but nowadays the other two are been using more and more in schools.

-BEHAVIOURISM: is the typical one in which we learn by following someone so the figure of the teacher is very important because is the one who guides the group.

• Knowledge: is a classical class in which the teacher speaks and students repeat his words in a mechanical way, it is necessary an environmental stimulus. When we have the knowledge, we can use it even if we don’t have the reference. Students absorbed repertoire of behaviours in a passively way.
• Learning: students learn by repeating and imitating the teacher individually and the learners are passive. Teachers taught students the responses to some stimulus.
• Motivation: teachers motivate students by stimulation and punishment. Students relate a concrete stimulus with a concrete response.
• Teaching: a theoretical class in which students repeat constantly what the teacher wants them to say. They also use the method question (stimulus) and answer (response) in which questions are gradually increasing difficulty but always teachers are controlling.

This theory is the typical one that I think most of us know because is the one that is used in schools. When I was at school teachers taught us something and we had to repeat and learn it. They didn’t teach us why we were learning those things and the sense they had, we only learned and finish. If someone asked why things were like that, teachers didn’t know what to answer they said that it was like that and finish. I think this is a bad method because students are not learning anything, they are only repeating and forgetting things. The purpose of educators with this method is to make students to memorize many things and evaluate them with exams, they don’t care if they are understanding and learning. Here there is an other important problem, in schools they use to calificate children depending on their intelligence. If they have bad marks, it seems that this student doesn’t worth so finally kids try to compete with each other and they start ‘a war’. Another disadvantage of this method is that educators teach students to repeat the acceptable behaviour and the unacceptable one will die, so they don’t have freedom; they only can learn what teachers want.

-CONSTRUCTIVISM: with this method teachers help students to construct new knowledge through previous structured knowledge that are supposed they already have. Educators care more about what go inside the learners head and how they interpret the information they are receiving.

• Knowledge: It is like a spiral, a system that is growing up everyday by learners. They have to organize their knowledge in order not to confuse things. It is a complex set of mental representations derived from past learning experiences, so students actively construct new knowledge.
• Learning: this process mixes the old knowledge and the new one. Learning means change, so we can learn by discovering new things in an actively way. Teachers have to help children to assimilate new knowledge using different resources.
• Motivation: learners need to find their own motivation to understand how the world works. They personally have to accept their limitations and the need to modify existing beliefs.
• Teaching: learners have to assimilate new information into the previous one. The teacher guides students while they are discussing a problem or some questions, when they explain something with their words they assimilate it better.

-SOCIO-CONSTRUCTIVISM: students build the knowledge in community. Social interactions and relationships between individuals are very important to improve students’ knowledge.

• Knowledge: the teacher helps students to improve their knowledge with the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Language and culture play essential roles in human intellectual development because they allow them to experience, communicate and understand reality.
• Learning: social interaction between the learner and others. First students reach a stage in with they can solve problems by themselves but then they reach more complicated stages with the help of teachers.
• Motivation: the teacher has the role of stimulating students with regards provided by the knowledge community.
• Teaching: individual learning is related to the success of group learning in a process of interactions, which are controlled by teachers.

Depending on what we think learning is, it will affect on managing a class and on the way of teaching students. From my point of view constructivism is the best way of learning and teaching. The other two theories have some disadvantages so constructivism in the best one. In behaviourism, children don’t have freedom to learn so this is a mistake as they can not be creative and develop abilities by themselves. In socio-constructivism children are very independent and maybe this can be a problem because they may sometimes get lost. So for me, constructivism is the best one; children have freedom to learn from their experiences and the previous knowledge, but also teachers have the role to help and guide them in order to improve knowledge in a better way. 

Child development

Another activity we made was to read an article about child development. Child development is all the changes that occur on a child’s life until adolescence. Humans change over the time because this is something natural. These changes happen due to many factors, for example a child is influenced by his family, his friends, his school and also by his culture and his society. Children mature over the time and they improve their knowledge and abilities. All educators need to be knowledgeable about children development because they have to know what methods they have to use to teach them. They also have to know each child individually in order to help them if they had some problems. So we, as future teachers, have to be conscious of the importance and influences that we have on a child ideas and on his development.

The article also presented some theorists  and their approaches to child development, some of them see it as a largely individual (like Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner or Sigmund Freud)  and some others were concerned more with the influences of society, history culture and context (like Lev Vygotsky, Barbara Rogoff, or Loris Malaguzzi).

Last issue of the article was about ‘sustained shared thinking’.  The learning that took place between a pair of learner and adult is called ‘sustained share thinking’ in which also the adult is able to help the child to take the next step in learning. Teachers have to pay attention to the behave and the feelings of students and encourage them to improve. We also have to know that we can learn from children (they know more about technologies for example), so it is a process in which each one learn from the other.

Finally in the last class we were talking about some methods of learning. There are three: behaviourism, constructivism and socio-constructivism.

- Behaviourism: we learn by following someone (teachers, parents, friends), in a class the figure of the teacher is the one who guides the group.

- Constructivism: we construct new knowledge through previous knowledge.

- Socio-constructivism: we build knowledge in community with interactions between the learner and others. The teacher helps and guides students to improve their knowledge with the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and also he has the role of stimulating students.

Teaching activity

In Didactic classes we have done many things so I am going to explain all but in different entries.

One day we had to prepare in groups a teaching exercise in which we had to explain children how to add and substract. We prepared in small groups and then each group had to explain to all the class as if they were in a real class with children. The problem was that not all the children were Spanish so we had to explain it in English. Saadet also explained it in Turkish so we learned some words and Jesse taught in Finish so we learned some numbers in this language.

This was a good experience because we had to think as if we were real teachers and face the class. We had to use easy vocabulary in order to students could understand us. I learned how to talk to children, the importance to make funny classes so that students don’t get bored and different ways to explain things.

In the future, when we were teachers we will have to explain things very clear and if someone doesn’t understand it we will have to use another method so that they finally understand it. The aim of the teachers is not to explain things once and go to another thing, the aim is to help students to understand things and improve their knowledge. It is very important to know that the most important figure of the class is the student and not the contents.

I hope to do more activities like this because we can learn many things and train ourselves so that in the future we know how to face a real class.

The development of our knowledges

From the first day, we have learnt many different things in Didactics classes. The first day Mina gave us some questions to answer and this was a good work because I had to think on things that I had never care about before. Some of the questions were the meaning of education for us, the definition of primary education, of teaching, of learning… and I had to think a lot.

The second day we learnt the main aims of education (social development, equal opportunity, preparation for work, democracy, parental participation…) and we reflect on which were the most important for us.

Other day we had to read the LOE and LOMCE and compare them. We did this activity to understand the meaning of curriculum, the aims of education, how education has changed, the basic contents of schooling…

Another task we had to do was to read some articles about the thoughts of different philosophers, in order to know different points of view about the education and its aims.

Last day we were talking deeper about the curriculum and its levels. It has four levels: the first one is the difference between the national curriculum and the communities curriculum including the education aims, the development, the pedagogical methods, the objectives, competences, contents, methodology, assessment…

The second level is the Center’s Educational Project and the tools each school can use. The third level is the class programme where each teacher has to plan their subject, how they will teach it and with what objectives.

The last level is the special attention to children who need it because they have problems to follow a normal class, so they need special teachers and special classes to encourage their development.

Discovering the world

Hello everyone!
I am Eva Sánchez and I am 18 years old. This is my new blog but I don't know too much about how it works so I will have to explore it. I create this blog for university because my teacher of Didactica has told us to create one. I will use it during all the quarter so I will be writting a lot about very interesting things.