Have you ever thought about what the experience of learning entails? When would you say that you have learned something? When did you learn to brush your teeth? Ride a bike? These are some ideas I have been thinking about this week. I recently read some of Bransford, Brown & Cocking's (2000) How People Learn.
I wrote an essay, Ultimate Purpose of Learning in the Classroom, and it is influenced by my reading. In my essay, I define learning as gaining knowledge, which occurs as a result from experience, studying or being taught. Then, I reflect on how this conceptualization of learning connects to the ideas of transfer and to teaching in my classroom by realizing I am going to transfer the practices and ideas I learned while reading into my classroom. Woah... that sounds confusing doesn't it? But what I mean is transfer is the ultimate goal of learning and fostering my students' ability to transfer by motivating, connecting to their lives, building upon their background knowledge and facilitating active/ dynamic lessons. Living in Hawaii, culture is a strong identity for most of my students. For example, we just wrote an essay about whether it was important or not to preserve indigenous culture (when colonization occurs) and why it is. It was so amazing to see the strong opinions of each of my students about how important it was in their mind to preserve culture and some of them being born and raised here, their strong feelings about preserving the Hawaiian culture.
I want my students to be able to take what they experience and learn/understand in my classroom into their home, community, workplace, etc. I welcome comments or reflections and you can also follow my emerging scholarship on Twitter at @ShelbyHurst24.
It is confusing at first, however once I was able to grasp the concept of conceptual change. I was able to piece everything together. I think reading about learning, understanding, and conceptual change is important because it reminded me of what I need to do prior to new concepts/topics! There are so many factors that children bring to the classroom, and we need to peel back the layers so we are able to truly teach our students.