The assignment illustrated below is mainly based on Engagement with learning portfolio. Please revieew the two case scenarios illustrated below and on behalf of the reading answer the following questions.
Case scenario 1:
The probability to go to a famous university for each person is very slim. In China people think education background is very important therefore there are a lot of parents ignore their children’s behavior development.Every child has different individual and character so teacher need to know how to use human development theories to teaching individual children. When I was in year three my english teacher Ms Zhang gave me a lot of help to improve my oral speaking. The first time i touched english was in year three. I really didn't know what is english, how people talk in english and is it useful to me? I brought these doubts to my first english class. We studied alphabet in class. In order to help us remember the alphabet our teacher made some cue cards with pictures for us learning, such as A is apple, B is banana and C is cat…… This class left a deep impression on me. She used these cards to attracted children’s attention, it was a good way to applied the theories of cognitive development. “When a child has a new experience that dose not fit into his or her existing understanding, then a state of ‘cognitive disequilibrium’ occurs.” (Marsh,C.J.,Clarke,M.& Pittaway,S.(2015)b. Ms Zhang provided us an easy way to learn the now knowledge combined with life and balance our cognitive behavior. When we studied english story in year four, she helped us rehearsal a drama based on our textbook. I felt it is a good way to help me understanding the story and sparked my interest. Ms Zhang activated the develop independence to us. It is a good behavioral for us to apply in our future study.
Case scenario 2:
Learning is not only concern on the outcome of learning, but also trained an ability about how to learning in an effective way. Learning strategies are very important for every learner to apply in study. This week we will talk about the cognitive strategies, which help us in our learning experience.
Concept map is a two-dimensional diagram representing the conceptual structure of subject matter. (Mclnerney, D (2015) a). When I was in high school my history teacher showed me a new method to construct historical events which is concept map. In class we were asked to identify the relevant concepts in a section of our textbook and draw a prediction map first, after that we were work in pairs to draw the concept map and present our outcomes. When I was working with my partner we chose to focus on the historical timeline to show the hierarchy clearly. The teaching approaches the teacher used is was concept mapping strategies to help student leaning. This is a useful way to help us remember the historical development, especially before the exam we can use the concept map to review our textbook easily. It helps us to assess what we know and to clarify our understanding of concepts. (Mclnerney, D (2015) a). The concept map not only help students to understand the material and to see the links between various pieces of information, but also to remember it more effectively.
Summarization is another one of the strategies I used when I studied History of Ideas. Only after reading a plenty of books and resources, we were able to evaluate the historical significances and got to know some vital events in history. However, the biggest problem was we could not remember too many contexts when we also had other subjects need us to focus on. Then, I started to collect the key ideas to made conclusions about the articles, in case to help me recall them whenever I forget.
These concise summaries really work for us, especially when we prepared for the final exam. First of all, we did not have to waste time read those articles again since I can refresh my memory after I review my summary. Secondly, it gains us the competence of understanding. As cited in Marsh, C.J. (2015, P.86), Kobayashi, Mayer, Wittrock and Alesandrini (2006, 1996, 1990) state that the active generation of summaries has been found to facilitate the comprehension and retention of textual material. Overall, recall of the passages was improved by the use of this graphic summarizing technique was suggested (Marsh et al., 2015).
In conclusion, summarization and concept map are really benefit to our study. They both assisted us to construct outline of the reading, and they helped us to memorize the text in different ways. One is using main ideas, like brief topic sentences or notes to shorten the wordy details, in more concise, informative way. The other is presenting the relationship between concepts by certain key words and then build a pertinence framework. Therefore, the summarization focus more on the main points of the context, while the concept map helped more on the understanding of the concept.
Part 1:
1) When deciding which approach to teaching to take, what, in your view, is the relative importance of teacher versus learner needs?
2) 'Students are not failing because of the curriculum. Students can learn almost any subject matter when they are taught with methods and approaches responsive to their learning style strengths' (Dunn, 1990, p. 15). Do you support the view that students have dominant learning styles? Should students be 'matched' with modes of instruction that suit their learning styles? Give details of how this might be achieved.
3) 'Teaching cannot simply consist of telling. It must enlist the pupil's own active participation since what gets processed gets learned' (Tomlinson & Quinton, 1986). What approaches to teaching can a teacher use to encourage more active student participation?
4) Discuss how technology can enrich teaching and learning. What are some of the challenges for teachers and students in using computers in classrooms?
5) 'Students need enough freedom to become cognitively active in the process of sense making, and students need enough guidance so that their cognitive activity results in the construction of useful knowledge' (Meyer, 2004, p. 16). Is Meyer (2004) suggesting that both freedom and guidance are essential? Explain using examples.
6) What do you think students learn when they work together?
Part 2:
1) A short introductory summary on the topic of "What are learning and teaching?"
2) A compilation of the four tutorial tasks that have been improved based on the feedback received throughout the four weeks. The compilation must include evidence of readings and tutorial discussions.
3) A short conclusion on "What have you learned about learning and how this understanding is important in education?'.
Attachment:- Chapter 1_Understanding Learning.pdf