One of the endorsements that I am in the process of obtaining is reading. Therefore, when I was asked to have a friend explain a concept that I will be teaching in the future, I immediately turned to reading. I plan on teaching early childhood, so this example isn't completely accurate, but it still got me thinking of how my future students could incorporate the learning theories into their acquisition of knowledge without even knowing it.
When I asked a friend to explain the concept of reading this is what they said:
- learning the phonics of how words are sounded out
- learning how words are put together to form sentences
- practice
One of the reasons I stated above that this wasn't completely accurate is because of the age of my friend. As we get older, we think more abstractly and therefore questions such as the concept of reading can be thought into way more than need be, which is what I feel like happened in this situation. The answers I was hoping to get were more along the lines of reading with someone else or having them read to you, obtain a better understanding of new vocab, etc. All things that I could undoubtly label to a specific learning theory. I almost feel that the answers of my friend were more about the process of learning language, but either way I think it is hard to put those specific thoughts into a learning theory other than constructivism. I chose that one because the process of learning phonics/sentence structure comes from prior knowledge, but it might also involve some reconstruction of your schema in order to completely understand the concept of reading. Practice could be labeled as all three because depending on what type of practice is it, I think it could possibly fit into any learning theory.
That's a great question. It's kind of funny that sometimes we as college students can be pushed so much to think abstractly by professors that we can pretty much forget how to answer a question practically. We can over analyze a simple question. I do think CLT tries to explain the the way our brain forms schemas, sometimes I think our schemas can become disconnected from actual reality. For example I can sometimes get so caught up in math that I forget why the math is actually important. It is so critical that we can think across the DLT spectrum. All those answers that your friend gave may be true, but words can become very ambiguous when talking about abstract topics.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of you- it's sometimes more difficult not to make something more abstract (and less concrete) out of a question. I also think that it sometimes does require reconstruction and shifting of a particular schema to understand learning. Just because we have elements of "reading" in our schemas doesn't mean we have processed and internalized how to learn to read.
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