Reading Reflection

opelak

EDUC 455

Reading Reflection 1

01/28/2014

Knowing how students learn can help educators meet students where they are academically while presenting material to the class. Furthermore, understanding how to effectively engage students can assist in students becoming involved learners in the classroom.

According to How Students Learn History, one way teachers can build instructional consistency is to organize the curriculum around history’s key concepts, big ideas, and central questions.

To accomplish this goal, teachers need to be familiar with the National Research Council’s three principles of student learning. Principle one states that students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom. To meet the implications for teachers according to this principle, educators must draw out and work with the preexisting understandings that their students bring with them. On the one hand, accurate prior knowledge provides a needed scaffold on which to build new ideas and understandings. On the other hand, what students think they know can be more of a barrier to learning than the students’ lack of knowledge.

To help meet the requirements for principle one, teachers need to find out what their students already know about a topic. For example, before starting a new topic in class, history teachers need to engage students in discussion by asking them to explain and apply what they know, or think they know, about the topic. Another way to meet the requirements of principle one is to connect t...

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...chers need to consider the implications of research findings and determine how they relate to particular courses, students, and available resources. Furthermore, history teachers should think about and continually assess their personal theories of learning and teaching in according to their first-hand classroom experiences. Teachers should experiment with different teaching approaches and activities and monitor the results, not only by using conventional tests but by carefully listening to students and evaluating information reflecting different aspects of their learning. In this way, teachers may continually analyze and refine their theories of how students learn statistics. Finally, students should be encouraged to assess their own learning as well as their belief of how they learn, by giving the students opportunities to reflect on the teaching/learning process.