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.