Week One-Learning Theories-What is My Personal Theory of Learing?

Application Assignment 1: Defining  My Personal Learning  Theory

Stephanie Karabaic

Walden University

Kathryn Arnold

Bridging  Learning Theory Instruction and Technology: 6711

January 7, 2013

Learning theories have existed as long as educators and those in the behavioral sciences have contemplated the best ways in which students learn and teachers should teach.There has been a disconnect from the theorist to the actual classroom in how  those theories functioned  in the real world of the classroom. As our society has become so much more  technologically advanced, we now have the insights provided by  brain imaging to add to the theoretical mix and support or debunk some of the prior findings. We also have the addition of educational  technology to provide a means to the end of educating students.

My  own theory on  learning  has evolved by my getting my hands dirty in the trenches of classroom experience as a teacher these last 27 years. The theorists, Piaget, Vygotsky, Skinner were the main players when I was in my college education courses. Bloom’s Taxonomy resonated with me as Bloom forced teachers to look beyond the typical question/answer reciprocal responses we were requiring of students in the1980s and prior,  to moving us to a deeper level of instructional design and expectation of student learning output. Bloom’s theory formed foundations of how learners learn and how I should craft my lessons toward those learning characteristics. Bloom led me to design instruction with a focus on the deep learning students should be assimilating, and consequently demonstrating. As a result of Bloom’s Taxonomy teachers  moved to an expectation that students would not merely read and respond by stating back from memorization, but instead they would interact with information,assimilate it, and demonstrate their learning by thinking deeply and producing evidence of that thinking. As in Orey’s book,  Emerging Perspectives on Learning, Teaching and Technology (p. 3,2001)states:

As history has shown, this well known, widely applied scheme filled a void and provided educators with one of the first systematic classifications of the processes of thinking and learning. The cumulative hierarchical framework consisting of six categories each requiring achievement of the prior skill or ability before the next, more complex, one, remains easy to understand. Out of necessity, teachers must measure their students' ability. Accurately doing so requires a classification of levels of intellectual behavior important in learning. Bloom's Taxonomy provided the measurement tool for thinking. (Orey, 2001,p3)

Prior to really understanding and integrating Bloom’s Taxonomy, teachers were doing  what  the other  teachers were doing in the 1980s and that was teaching, offering board notes for students  to copy, and require students complete assignments. The task was to merely memorize, and demonstrate that memorization on a multiple choice worksheet or test . Once in awhile there would be an essay, but even that essay would  illicit not mastery of a topic but a ‘retelling’ of the material.

Present day theories of  Gardner's Multiple Intelligences also seem to connect with my own style of  teaching more in 2013. I do believe that each of us as lifelong learners have propensities towards doing things that work for us. It may be that since I love to write, I write and it comes to me with a fluidity and ease that others do not experience. While others demonstrate their strengths in their dominant intelligences through hands on activities, musical performances, or socially connecting with others tapping into their interpersonal strength. Why is it we enter the careers that  we enter? Is it because we have a  strength and consequently a predisposition towards that strength?

It does make me dominance in intelligences as I teach my students to improve their basic writing skills by writing  a paragraph only to find them complain and balk. Gardener might tell me to let them use other ways to express themselves, however, students need to be able to write basic sentences, paragraphs, and even essays for school and work. It is an expectation that they have a certain skill set completed, otherwise the educational systems are attacked for not providing students with the most basic of skills. So, then how do we provide students with those skills while considering and catering to their multiple intelligences? The question might be, how do we teach them in ways that they will not only be able to complete the assignment today, but in days, months and years to come will still maintain that skill and memory at a level where they will retain it and be able to gain access to it in the future.Willis gives us information regarding this issue including important brain data and multiple intelligences (2008):

These neuroplasticity findings allow us to consider which strategies and classroom environments promote increased stimulation of memory or strengthening of cognitive neural networks. For example, appealing to a variety of learning styles when we review important
instructional information could provide repeated stimulation to multiple neural networks containing this information. Each type of sensory memory is stored in the lobe that receives the input from that sensory system. Visual memory is stored in the occipital lobes, auditory memory is stored in the temporal lobes, and memories of tactile experiences are stored in the parietal lobes. There could be greater potential for activation, restimulation, and strengthening of these networks with
practice or review of the information through multisensory learning, resulting in increased network efficiency for memory storage and retrieval.(Willis, 2008, 426)

The more teachers can present information using differing channels of delivery, accessing those different lobes in the brain, it appears, the more the receivers of the information will have the greater likelihood of being able to understand, assimilate,recall and retrieve that information at a later timer. As a teacher, this information is vital as I design activities and lessons. Educators need to  present lessons in ways that  students can gain access more channels to reach students. How I will achieve that goal will involve a great deal of planning and thinking outside of the  box.

Technology has the potential to bridge those learning channels remarkably well. Students in my reading classes read on an ipad using Kindle ebooks. They can alter the size of the print, alter the color of the background of  the screen, change the font, and modify the brightness. Students make notes right inside the text, using kinesthetic and visual channels at  the same time. We use ipad apps like Popplet, a mind mapping tool to create visual representations of the plot events of the story. Students can create visuals and pictures of an event or an idea. They can change the color of the text and text box, demonstrating differing characters, themes, and variations of thought. Students have created their own blogs. They have personalized them to reflect  who they are as individuals.  Each week they add one or two responses to a literary prompt relating to their novels. Deep thinking, making connections, and  manipulating information to create blog  posts allows them to work beyond the surface. Channels  of Visual, Kinesthetic are being tapped into. If they desire, they can use  the application Dragon and dictate their blog post. In this way they are using auditory, oral, and visual channels to deepen the level  of response and thinking. They  use the Smartboard  and actively highlight key words or concepts in a Google Document projected on the  Smartboard. My students take pre-tests I design using Google  Forms and scan QR codes to do a very quick assessment of their pre-teaching understanding of concepts. All in all, I find technology as a gift that I utilize everyday but have had to fight and advocate for its use. A tool is only a useless tool, unless we make it a valuable and useful tool. In my classroom, technology is a priceless gift that opens some very heavy doors to the access to the learning that  my students were never able to open before.

    Learning theories and instructional theories have the effect to continue to guide our instruction in the physical and virtual classroom to benefit all learners today. We can now use those learning theories and instructional theories to widen our scope and apply them in an educational world that did not exist a mere 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Skinner, Piaget, Gardner,and Bloom could not have possibly anticipated how education would change with all of the digital tools our students have access to using. As much as I might have thought these ‘experts’ were old and dated, their theories can once again breathe life when we consider them in this new era of education where technology tools allow us to access and utilize many of those theorists’ theories in new and exciting ways.

References:

Orey, M. (Ed.). (2001). Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Retrieved January 5, 2013, from http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Main_Page
http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy#What_is_Bloom.27s_Taxonomy.3F

Willis, J. (2008, February). Building a bridge from neuroscience to the classroom. Phi Delta Kappan, 89(6), 424–427. Retrieved Jan. 5, 2013,using the Academic Search Complete database.