FINAL LEARNING LOG

What?

After taking the test to see how i believe people learn best, I found that I believe in Cognitive Development the most. In the cognitive chapter I learned about the different elements of getting information and how and where it goes. Encoding, retrieval, and storage are all part of the process. We looked at the model of how memory is processed and stored. Information goes through a series of processes in order to be used as short term memory, long term memory, or is lost. You can promote short term memory by using mnemonics, chunking, and massed practice. To gain more long term memory you can try doing more hands on activities and distributed practice.

Information goes into the brain and then is processed. First there has to be some sort of stimuli or input that wants to go into the brain. These stimulus' are entered through our senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc). Then the information goes through a process of sensory registry and it is quickly scanned for importance and precoding. Some information is lost here. After a processes called Attention (which is focusing on a particular stimuli), information goes into the working or short-term memory stage. Here is where maintenance rehearsal takes place along with coding and recoding. Some information is lost again. Then through the process of encoding, information is passed down to the Long term memory stage where it is stored and used in the future.

Memory is very much so connected with emotions and senses. Think about when you were a child. Visualize the sights and smells of a particular place. Now today if you were to smell that same smell, you would be taken back to that place as a child. Remember detail. The one down fall of memory is that it is always changing and reinterpreting. This leaving room for misunderstanding and confusion. Learning is a semi-permanent change in the mental process and it's mostly due to experience. There are many different reasons why people sometimes can't remember information but the most common reasons are because you may not have completely decoded the information, there is interference because something else is in the way of that memory, or because of decay, the idea of use it or lose it.

Encoding is an important process to help retain information for the future. There are several different ways to encode, here are a few:

Rehearsal
Meaningful learning (previous knowledge)
Organization (chunking)
Elaboration
Visual Imagery
Enactment
Mnemonics

I really liked this chapter and found it really helpful. Before this assignment I thought I believed in the Behaviorist Theories the most, however, I have learned otherwise. I liked behaviorist because I truly believe in the idea of motivation of students or people in general. People won't do things without knowing that there is something in it for them, so it's important to give students those motivations and also train them on how to behave.

So What?

This chapter is important for me to understand so I can better utilize different skills in my classroom. Understanding how the brain works and how my students are going to remember or recall the information that we give them in class will help me as a teacher know how to help students retain or recall that information. I know that most of the information that students learn in my class is lost shortly after the class is over; however, I believe that if we help them use different memorization skills and do activities that will help students store that information in different parts of the brain, it is more likely that they will be able to use it in the future. Memory is a process and not something that just happens, so I believe it is important to help steer the information in the direction that I want it to go.

Now What?

I have found the Educational Psychology class to be really helpful and informative for me. I loved learning about all the different ways in which students learn because that will be a key component to how I structure my lesson plans. I would like to better understand the aspects of Erikson's Psycholsocial stages of development. I know the eight stages, but I want to be able to work with students in these stages to better understand the impacts of actually dealing with issues in those stages. Some students will be in different stages in my class such as industry lv. inferiorityl, initiative v guilt, identity v. role confusion. Erikson says that my students will only be in Identity v. role confusion, but I think that they may fall into a couple different categories at once and it will be interesting to learn more about that and see if my theory is correct!

Group Differences Learning Log

What?

In this chapter we learned about being able to recognize the differences between students. There are natural barriers between students that occur just because of age, sex, race, or social status. It is important to notice these differences and work with them to the best of our ability. It is not smart to be colorblind in the classroom. You just need to be sensitive. There are also students that are at high risk which means that they have a high probability of dropping out of school or failing. We need to pay special attention to these individuals and make an extra effort to help them succeed. Many times these student don't have a good parent figure that gives them the confidence to do well in school, so it may be out job to be there for them to support and encourage them. We can't teach to one group of students or be bias in any wayl. We need to be sensitive to these different groups and be a nuetrlal player. Everyday as teachers we look through our cultural lens; our cultural background. We neeld to keep an open mind and by willing to learn about other cultures in order to better understand our students.
There are a few gender differences between boys and girls. First misconception is that one gender is not better in math or writing then the other. This common misconception is false and we must not gleltl trapped in guiding our student's in directions that are not always good for them. Boysl do seem to express themselves in a more phsyical aggressive way while girls are more emotional aggressive.

So What?

This topic is really important. That is why we devote a whole class to this very issue. Students in the United States all have come from different backgrounds and cultures. This is unlike a situation as if you were living in Japan where everyone had the same culture. Teachers need to be aware and do their best not to label students before you get to know them. Just because their asian, doesnt mean their smart. And just because their black, doesnt mean they play sports. These are common assumption, but we can't label students. Give them a clean slate and really get to know them. If there is a cultural mismatch, as teachers we need to be flexible and willing to work it out with the students so they don't have to compromise their culture, but still are learning in your classroom.

Now What?

As a future teacher, I think it would be benefical to start to get to know other cultures NOW. Why wait. Be outgoing and chatty and get to know those I assiciate with better and learn about their culture. This will not only allow me to get to know my friends better, but I will be better prepared for the day that I have something come up in my classroom! I think it is smart to look up the demographics of the school I'm going to be teaching at to know how many student's are on free or reduced lunch because that effects their socioeconomic status. this information will give me a heads up and I can be sensitive to that.

Individual Differences and Special Educaional Needs Learning Log

What?

During chapter five we learned about Individual Differences which means the variability in abilities and characteristics(intelligence, personality, etc.) among students at a particular age. There are multiple different ways in which students may learn or grow within a classroom. It is out job as teachers to take this knowledge and make sure that every student has an opportunity to learn with their best learning styles. Intelligence is the ability to modify and adjust behaviors to accomplish new tasks successfully; involves many different mental processes and may vary in nature depending on one's culture. There were five different studies that we covered in class dealing with individual differences. Spearman's G deals with general factors that influences one's ability to learn and perform in a wide variety of context. Catell's Fluid and Crystallized deals with things that come easily or innate,l and using prior knowledge to quickly adapt new information. Sternberg's Triarchis Theory is a complex theory involving two elements, Environmental context, Prior Knowledge, and Cognitive Process. Under each element holds different elements that fall into each category. Distributed Intelligence basically says that anyone will be more intelligent if they use aspects of their physical, cultural, or social environments. These include, technology, charts and graphs, and team work. The last theory that wel discussed in class was Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. In this theory they believe that there is eight different ways to learn including, lingustic, logistics, spacial, music, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. This is one of the most qualified and used theories around.
Concerning students with special needs, we discussed that resources students have including, IDEA (individuals with disabilities Education Act), IEPl's (Individual Education Plan), and Inclusion. These are programs that have been developed to help those students who need extra attention or accomadations in order to succeed in school.

So What?

This chapter was important because it is crucial to understand that students all learn in different ways and that they may have certain natural talents in one area, when someone else has a talent in another. As a teacher is would be fun to get to know students well enough that you can allow them to use their talents for their benefit but also get them to do things they are not comfortable with as well to push them to reach their potential and help them find thier identity. Concerning students with special needs. This is always going to be a struggle to make sure these students don't fall behind or are so bored in my class that they hate it. There needs to be a balance between the two and as a teacher I need to make sure that I'm well aware of my class and their success and progress throughout the year. It's important to be aware of how IEP's work so that I can play an active role in my students success.

Now What?

Now as a teacher I think that it's important to know how our students learn; that is the biggest key. Being aware of this will guide you in what you decide to teach and how you teach it. It's always a smart idea to ask questions as a new teacher and get ideas from other more experienced teachers. Never be afraid to clarify with someone else. If I am struggling reaching a student, ask other teachers that have that student what they do to help them and see if those strategies help me.

Behaviorism Learning Log

What?

In chapter nine we explored the concepts involved in the behavior of students. Much of this chapter seemed rather familiar from my psychology class a few years ago. Being able to condition behavior in your classroom is what will save you as a teacher. Classical Conditioning is a common form of learning in order to get students to do what you want. Students come into your classroom with unconditioned responses from their past experiences. For example, you mention a pop quiz, and many students freak out and get really flustered. This is unconditioned, little do they know that the quiz could be simply writing their opinion about the past class period, an easy task, however they have already overreacted. It is the teacher’s job to be the reinforcer in most cases. Positive reinforcement is always a good strategy; however, negative reinforcement is also a very beneficial application. I personally find negative reinforcement more motivating for me. When I have a big project due, I get stressed out and I often times get it done early so that I don’t have to stress over it anymore and joy my time. That is an example of negative reinforcement. A positive reinforcement would be getting extra credit if it was done early or something like that. Often times that is unrealistic.

The definition of Learning when associated with Behaviorism is SEMI-Permanent change in behavior. The biggest misconception found in this unit is the difference between Negative Reinforcement and Punishment. Reinforcement ALWAYS INCREASES behavior, while punishment DECREASES behavior. Overall Behaviorism is successful because is to goal oriented and frequently shows success which increases self-esteem.

So What?

This is a very important chapter when studying Educational Psychology. It is very beneficial to be able to learn how to better train our students. From my experiences growing up and teaching, I have learned that it is easier to get the desired behavior you want if you make the students think it is their idea or repeatedly training them until it is second nature to them. I believe that Reinforcers are the best way to get the desired behavior from my students. Kids want recognition, so positive reinforcements will come in handy and really boost students work ethic and self-esteem.

Now What?

As I prepare to enter the work force, I need to come prepared with ideas of how to use these reinforcers to gain the behavior that I want from my kids. I need to come up with a system that my students may follow and allow it to become second nature to them.

There are many different ideas of reinforcers that we can use as teachers to get the behaviors that we want in our classroom. You can provide short periods of free time, spend one on one time with your students that need the attention or who seem isolated, or provide explicit feedback about what things students have done will. Also in older grades levels it is helpful to acknowledge student’s concern about getting good grades, acknowledge student’s involvement in extracurricular activities or sports in the local media, or provide opportunities for independent decision making and responsibility, especially when students show that they can make wise decisions. All these examples will help me in the future. As I do my Teacher Work Samples and Observations, I need to really look out for different ways in which teachers condition their students and gain that desired behavior.

Knowledge Construction Study Guide

What?

Within Chapter 7, Knowledge Construction jumps into different strategies which are good for student learning. We learn that students come in with different ideas of concepts that come from their prior knowledge and life experience. It’s stressed that as teachers we need to address these different ideas and help students understand that their misconceptions are not adequate. In the chapter they discussed the importance of prototypes and their role in the classroom. Prototypes are good for students to understand the typical example of the concept, but they also need to know that they are NOT the only example. Student’s misconceptions are dangerous and crucial to be cleared; however, there is a special way to go about it. When correcting a student, you don’t want to ruin their self-esteem.

Learning is an active process based on prior knowledge and experience. The more you can personalize the activity the more fun it is for the students; however, you may recieve some misconceptions along the way that you need to be watching out for. There are many different misconceptions that can pop up during teaching but there are a few rules to follow as you correct a students misconceptions. They are as follows:

• Identify existing misconceptions before instruction begins.
• Convince students their beliefs are inadequate.
• Motivate students to know the truth.
• Maintain high self-esteem.
• Monitor what students say and write for persistent misconceptions.

If you follow these simple steps you will find it easier to help students better understand the material.

So What?

I believe that this chapter is an important part of our curriculum because it's crucial to know that students may come into my classroom with preconceived notions about the topics that I cover. i need to be prepared to know the different misconceptions that will arise and then be prepared to help students get over that obstacle. The biggest challenge will be telling the students that they are wrong without killing their self-esteem. This could potentially ruin a teenager if they are humiliated in the classroom. That's why it's so important to understand the steps to get students to look at it from your point of view and almost manipulate them to think that it was their idea that it was wrong. If you word it in a way that they feel like they came up with the correct answer, they will more likely accept it!

Now What?

One way to implement Knowledge Construction in the classroom is by doing the 5 E's activity. Each of the 5 E's describes a phase of learning, and each phase begins with the letter "E": Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. The 5 E's allows students and teachers to experience common activities, to use and build on prior knowledge and experience, to construct meaning, and to continually assess their understanding of a concept.

Engage: This phase of the 5 E's starts the process. An "engage" activity should do the following:

1. Make connections between past and present learning experiences
2. Anticipate activities and focus students' thinking on the learning outcomes of current activities. Students should become mentally engaged in the concept, process, or skill to be learned.

Explore: This phase of the 5 E's provides students with a common base of experiences. They identify and develop concepts, processes, and skills. During this phase, students actively explore their environment or manipulate materials.

Explain: This phase of the 5 E's helps students explain the concepts they have been exploring. They have opportunities to verbalize their conceptual understanding or to demonstrate new skills or behaviors. This phase also provides opportunities for teachers to introduce formal terms, definitions, and explanations for concepts, processes, skills, or behaviors.

Elaborate: This phase of the 5 E's extends students' conceptual understanding and allows them to practice skills and behaviors. Through new experiences, the learners develop deeper and broader understanding of major concepts, obtain more information about areas of interest, and refine their skills.

Evaluate: This phase of the 5 E's encourages learners to assess their understanding and abilities and lets teachers evaluate students' understanding of key concepts and skill development.

To implement this into a history context wouldn't be to hard. Say you were learning about WWII and the Genocide that occurred in Nazi Germany. You could start off by engaging the students in a videos clip that really catches the attentions of the students. Then they can explore the topic using a Web quest provided by the teacher. I made one in my Instructional Media class that would work great. Part of the Web quest would allow students to help explain what finds they have found and ask questions to the teacher. In this particular Web Quest they are asked to create a scrapbook of the different aspects of the holocaust. This is where they could really elaborate and be creative in their research. In groups they would present their scrapbook to the class and I could evaluate their understanding based on the scrapbook and presentation!

Cognitive Development Learning Log

What?

In this chapter we learned about the different elements of getting information and how and where it goes. Encoding, retrieval, and storage are all part of the process. We looked at the model of how memory is processed and stored. Information goes through a series of processes in order to be used as short term memory, long term memory, or is lost. You can promote short term memory by using mnemonics, chunking, and massed practice. To gain more long term memory you can try doing more hands on activities and distributed practice.
In the figure above, you can see the process of which information goes into the brain and then is processed. First there has to be some sort of stimuli or input that wants to go into the brain. These stimulus' are entered through our senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, etc). Then the information goes through a process of sensory registry and it is quickly scanned for importance and precoding. Some information is lost here. After a processes called Attention (which is focusing on a particular stimuli), information goes into the working or short-term memory stage. Here is where maintenance rehearsal takes place along with coding and recoding. Some information is lost again. Then through the process of encoding, information is passed down to the Long term memory stage where it is stored and used in the future.

Memory is very much so connected with emotions and senses. Think about when you were a child. Visualize the sights and smells of a particular place. Now today if you were to smell that same smell, you would be taken back to that place as a child. Remember detail. The one down fall of memory is that it is always changing and reinterpreting. This leaving room for misunderstanding and confusion. Learning is a semi-permanent change in the mental process and it's mostly due to experience. There are many different reasons why people sometimes can't remember information but the most common reasons are because you may not have completely decoded the information, there is interference because something else is in the way of that memory, or because of decay, the idea of use it or lose it.

Encoding is an important process to help retain information for the future. There are several different ways to encode, here are a few:

Rehearsal
Meaningful learning (previous knowledge)
Organization (chunking)
Elaboration
Visual Imagery
Enactment
Mnemonics

So What?

This chapter is important for teachers to understand so we can better utilize different skills in our classroom. Understanding how the brain works and how our students are going to remember or recall the information that we give them in class will help us as teachers know how to help students retain or recall that information. We all know that most of the information that students learn in our class is lost shortly after the class is over; however, I believe that if we help them use different memorization skills and do activities that will help students store that information in different parts of the brain, it is more likely that they will be able to use it in the future. Memory is a process and not something that just happens, so I believe it is important to help steer the information in the direction that I want it to go.

Now What?

Knowing this information now, it is a good idea to start using it. As you plan lesson plans and activities, build ones that are going to help the learning process. One of the biggest ideas is that we remember better if there are a lot of pathways to that information. That requires learning it different ways. I think we need to implement that into the classroom. Give students the chance to learn the same material in different ways. Also I really found it helpful when Professor Cox made up a mnemonic for us for the different stages of moral development. That is something that I would have NEVER done on my own, but was very helpful. I still could remember it today, where my normal habits of just cramming it in better I walked into the testing center would have been gone by now. As teachers I think it is smart to introduce these different styles of memorization to our students, even if we have to do that work for them. Or maybe after you have demonstrated a style for them, on the next assignment you have them make up their own mnemonic for homework. This will help students practice those different strategies and also help them for your unit test. I think it's a win-win situation!!

Moral & Social Development Learning Log

What?

In this chapter we discovered the roles of relationships and the emotional needs of students within the educational field. The primary point that we discussed were Erikson's Psychosocial Stages of Development. Erikson’s model of psychosocial development: Erik presented 8 different stages of psychosocial development in the span of a lifetime. The first stage is Trust versus Mistrust (infancy) which is an infant learns whether or not they can trust their caregiver for food, comfort, and affection. (Like when some babies don’t like strangers holding them?) The 2^nd stage is Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt (toddler years) which children can either develop a sense of accomplishment when they can finally feed themselves and go to the bathroom alone, but if parents are too demanding of their children doing things alone, the kid may feel doubt. The 3^rd stage is Initiative versus Guilt (preschool years) which is children begin to try to make plans for themselves and gain that independence, but if parents allow students to over do it and plan things that disrupt or are unattainable, the child may feel guilty. The 4^th stage is Industry versus Inferiority (elementary school years) is when students develop self confidence. Parents and teachers can make or break a child’s confidence. The 5^th stage is Identity versus Role Confusion (adolescence) is when they try to find their identity and place in the world. The 6^th stage is Intimacy versus Isolation (young adulthood) is after people have their identity but are looking for long term commitments or marriage. The 7^th stage is Generativity versus Stagnation (middle age) is having a sense of contribution to a family or society. The 8^th stage is Integrity versus Despair (retirement years) is the final developmental task. Seniors look back on their life with happiness that they did a lot and were successful, or they look back sad and wish they had done more. The other theorist that we talked about was Kohlberg's stages of Moral Development. His ideas included 3 moral levels and 6 stages within those morals. The stages are as follows, Stage 1: Punishment-avoidance and obedience, Stage 2: Exchange of Favors, Stage 3: Good Boy/Girl, Stage 4: Law and Order, Stage 5: Social Contract, and Stage 6: Universal Ethical Principle. Overall, in chapter 3 we learned why students get their insecurities and why they behave as they do during different stages of development.

So What?

This information is important for teachers to know so that we can be prepared. Understanding that Erikson's stages are not set in stone in regards to the age of which we experiences these stages, but to know that these stages to exist and that we need to be aware of them and looking for them in our students. As students begin to search for their true identity by figuring out their sense of self, we need to be a helping hand and give them a sense of direction when needed. As a future teacher, understanding that cliques and gangs are in my classroom, I can do the things necessary to create a community in my classroom.

Now What?

As a future teacher, this information will come in handy to better understand my students. Like I mentioned before, I want to create a community in my classroom and but doing that I need to be able to split up the cliques and gang members so that everyone can work together and maybe someday be able to understand one another. I can do this by creating a lot of group work in my class and separate the three girls in the back of the class who are always together and the 2 football players that hang out all afternoon. Doing this may create larger friendships and maybe allow students to learn about one another. As a grow as a teacher, I will be able to learn from fellow co-workers and possibly workshops that will help me learn more about reaching all different types of students and learners.