My Personal Learning Theory

I think that students learn best when they have intrinsic motivation. When the students do their work and can reinforce themselves, they are more motivated in the long run. I think that moving children towards this motivation is something you should always be doing while you teach. I also think that students learn best when we are not only focusing on academic skills, but involving social, emotional, spiritual and physical skills. A person as a whole is all those skills combined so if we are only fostering one aspect, the students wont be completely successful. I think that it is important to make students feel good about themselves and to help their self esteem and self efficacy. If a student does not believe that they are smart or that they can finish an assignment, they will not try hard enough or may not try at all. Students with a high self efficacy make goals and try hard to achieve them. They feel good about themselves and what they can do so they are more likely to achieve their goals. I also think that students need to be able to take responsibility of themselves and their learning. They should be given the opportunity to make goals and work to achieve them. I think that students learn best in a discovery learning environment. They can explore and learn from their surroundings. I think that students learn best when we relate what we are teaching to their life and how it could effect them. Also, I think that if the teacher is excited about what they are teaching, the students see that excitement and become more excited themselves and want to learn more.

I will integrate my personal learning theory in my classroom. I will really make sure to foster the students emotional and social needs. I will try to teach my students to become intrinsically motivated. I will do a lot of group work and discovery learning so that the students find out answers for themselves and work in groups to improve social skills. I am going to be excited to teach my lessons even if it may not be the most interesting thing to teach or learn about. I know that it really does help to be excited because Suzy Cox always came to class excited about what she was teaching and I got excited because I knew she loved what she was teaching us. Psychology was my favorite class even though it was probably the hardest because I always felt excited to learn. So I am really going to try hard to do this with everything I teach. I am going to do hands on activities and teach in a variety of ways. Suzy is also an example of this because she was always doing different thing with us like having us create a powerpoint in groups and then teach the class, and having us act out scenarios and many other things. Suzy really is a great example of how I would like to teach. I am going to make sure that every student gets the opportunity to finish assignments. Even if it is late or with help from the teacher. I think that if students finish assignments they feel better about themselves than if they never get the chance to finish. I think that this would help build self efficacy. If they start accomplishing tasks, they will feel like they can do more. I am going to try to say something to every student every day or few days, even if it is just a simple hello. I know this could get really hard but it is something I am going to try hard to do.

I think that I should learn more about how to create a more multicultural classroom environment. I do not know as much about different cultures as I would like. One thing I could do though, is as each year that I teach, I can find out where the students come from and I could have the students do a poster about their culture or anything else about them they would like the class to know. We can have each student share with the class a few each day or so until we finish (try to do it early so that we will know about each student before we get too far into the school year) I think that this could be something very beneficial to me. It would be hard for me to go and research every culture of every student, so the students can be the teacher of their culture. knowing what to do to help students who do not speak English very well or not at all, is also something that I don't feel prepared for yet. I guess we have a multicultural education class that we will be taking in this program to help that. This is the main stuff that I want to work on and learn more about.

Social Cognitive Theory

We learned in class about the social cognitive theory. This theory uses many things from the other theories. It is all about reinforcement, prior experience, motivation, and attention. This theory is learning about other people. Children especially look up to adults and learn from them. We watched the bobo doll experiment, showing that the children imitated the adult and even did more to the doll than the adult by threatening its life with a gun. We all learn form everything around us.

It is crazy that we really impact children that much. They learn from everything they see. Violent video games and movies cannot be good for children. They will imitate what they see and become violent. I really think that seeing the violence could lead to children being violent themselves. So, if we are good role models and act how we want others around us to act, children will copy us and do things that are good.

As a teacher, I will remember that the children are always watching and learning from me. I will try to be the best role model for my students by showing kindness to everyone and being honest. If the students see me being kind to a student they might not talk to, the might decide to start talking to that student and be kind to them and the rest of the classmates. If I acknowledge that I made a mistake or might not have been right, the students will realize that it is alright to make mistakes and to learn from them. I will be an important person in the students' lives and I can influence them for the good.

Behaviorism

We talked about behaviorism in class. We talked a lot about positive and negative reinforcement and punishment. I have learned about it before but I always got it mixed up. Now I will remember that both positive and negative reinforcements are used to increase the behavior while punishment is the only one that decreases the behavior. Positive reinforcement is when you are adding a reward while negative reinforcement is when you take away something that they do not like. We also talked about the differences between classical conditioning and operant conditioning. I have learned this before but I always find it very interesting.

This is very useful information to know. This is information you can use to shape children. I am a trainer for an ABA program for a three year old boy with autism. I use operant conditioning and reinforcements everyday. I do programs with this boy where I give a prompt, he responds to my prompt either right or wrong and I reinforce him for right responses. This boy did not speak or interact with people before we started this program in August. He really thrives with this program. He now can say around 100 words and he talks, gives high fives, and hug people. It is great. I use operant conditioning more literally in this program than most people use but we use it all the time. I find myself asking my niece questions about a story i read to her or anything else (give the prompt) and she answers (response) and I say good job! (reinforcement) It is interesting to see the reasoning behind it all. It is really beneficial to learn about reinforcements. We can learn to have students do what we want them to do by either adding something or taking it away.

We talked about in class that we are trying to get students to be able to reinforce themselves. That is the main thing that I am going to take away from it. We start by using tangible reinforcements and when we are able to, we move up to activity reinforcements, then social reinforcements. I think it is very important for students to be able to reinforce themselves. When I was in middle school and high school I was motivated by grades, not because my parents wanted me to get good grades (though they did) but because I wanted to do good in school and get good grades. When I did good on a test or project, knowing that I did good was all the reinforcement I needed. My brother and sister, though were told that if they get good grades, they could get money. Though my brother and sister got things for their grades I still was the child that got the best grades. I think that students do better when they are intrinsically motivated and when they can reinforce themselves. I will always be working with my students towards that. I think that at my job with the boy with autism, I will be working with him to achieve a social reinforcement and then an intrinsic reinforcement. Also, I really am going to try to make sure that I do not reinforce students for what they already love to do because I do not want to ruin that love.