The two themes of the Learning Theory that I chose to explore and discuss here are the first and the fourth themes. The first theme stated that “learning involves making cognitive connections.” The chapter 3 reading for this week discussed how students make scientific connections daily with the world surrounding them. “Connections among concepts become formed and are enriched as learners interact with the world, respond to human needs, make decisions, and make sense of new experiences they encounter.” (pg 56) The most important of these connections that students make are those associated with their prior knowledge and cultural, community, social and environmental experiences. This theme applies to curriculum in the sense that I can always seem to engage my students’ interest if I use their language while lesson planning. I can remember in my earlier days of teaching and encountering an unruly teaching assignment; I could engage student attention for the entire lesson by offering to rap a verse for them at the end of the period. If you speak their language, it is often very easy to engage student interest. I can remember teaching in my twenties and my brother got me the “hottest” pair of tennis shoes on the market at the time and I commanded my summer school students’ attention from the first day until the last with those sneakers. It was as if someone that cool to be up on the latest fashion (which I would have never paid $300 for a pair of shoes) deserved their undivided attention. I spoke the language of the urban students that I taught and I often looked for ways to naturally connect with them; albeit it was easy because I came from the same urban school district that I was teaching at the time.
One takeaway from this theme for me was the concept of using schmata. By definition, schmata are “elaborated webs of connected concepts.”(pg 57) When students are engaged in creating these webs linking together connected content learned it aids them in synthesizing the concepts leading to comprehension, retention, and understanding. “Developing schemata is critical to learning because when an investigation activates that web of knowledge, the cognitive load is lower than if the activity is unrelated to previously acquired knowledge, allowing learners to learn more, learn faster, or figure out a new situation.” (pg57) Moreover the main takeaway for me from this first theme was the statement: “The evidence that meaningful learning has occurred is that individuals can use their knowledge in new situations, that is, transfer understanding of a concept to new experiences.” I feel this statement ties directly into my grant proposal goal of transforming my middle years/high school students into published science writers for elementary STEM students.
The forth theme states that “learning involves social and emotional engagement in communities. What better way for my STEM students to immerse themselves into their science curriculum than to learn so much they could literally write a book on the subject? The authors further my claim by stating that “learning is enhanced within a collaborative community in which language is used as a tool to express knowledge, argue explanations and solutions, and come to resolution regarding the validity of evidence to support or refute a proposed explanation.” Throughout this science writing year long process, my students will also be tasked to convene at mock science writers conventions where they will have opportunities to collaborate with their peers, give and receive feedback, and make revisions to their work. These collaboration opportunities allow students to learn from each other, sharing their scientific understandings, as well as seamlessly performing the work of real science professionals.
Select two design features to promote interest and motivation through science investigation and engineering design and write examples of how you could implement them in your classroom.
The two design features that I would like to explore using to promote student interest and motivation are: providing students with a choice or autonomy in their learning and situating all science investigations in socially and culturally appropriate contexts. When given the opportunity to teach either a middle years or high school science class again, I plan to implement a science writing project that will span the entire school year. I feel students will definitely have a choice of which scientific topic they are choosing to teach a younger audience and some autonomy over the written and illustrated content of their book. The goal of the project is to have students aid in the creation of socially and culturally relevant science curriculum for elementary students, which is in line with the fourth design method. “To positively influence motivation, STEM lessons must be sensitive to the cultural and personal backgrounds of learners and leverage the power of social engagement to enhance interest development. Curriculum designed in this way can facilitate retention and reactivation of the learned content and develop interest.” (pg 69)
Comments