Week Three

     In starting year eleven of teaching, one thing I am sure of is that I still have work to do by way of implementing cognitive theories of learning to best meet the needs of every student in my classroom each and every year. If I thought it was challenging to meet the needs of around twenty first graders, I had no idea how tremendous the task would be with sixty-five to one hundred middle schoolers. The last year has shown me that it takes fortitude and resourcefulness to meet the needs of even a large portion of that number of students. Perfection is unattainable and unrealistic, but students, parents, administration, and teammates depend on my continual pursuit to improvement. 

    Understanding how thinking and learning occur within the brain as well as the differences in ways individuals process information, move items to long term memory, and resist interference are vitally important to choices in metacognition explicitly taught within the classroom and support a varied approach in hope of meeting the needs of all learners. Strategies for gaining the attention of the learner and for helping them access prior knowledge or build a lacking schema are factors that can create effective learning opportunities or those that are not noteworthy for retention to the learner. 

    Evidence that students really learn in different ways, require different support for possible interference and organization of information, and have varied background knowledge is that students with similar standardized test scores leave with different scores after a year of experiences in the same classroom. This year I had two students whom I considered high average based upon beginning data. They both seemed to attend at a similar level of engagement and participated similarly in class discussion. I found that one had met his growth goal for the year in January while the other student would be hard pressed to meet his by May. I searched my understanding, observations work samples, and conferred with other teachers about why the second student had not gained as much and how I could change my strategies to help him the second semester. The conclusion we came to was that the second student needed more social learning opportunities which had been almost impossible the first semester. By limiting how much metacognition the students participated in with peers, it seemed that this student was not as academically challenged or stimulated to move information to his working and long term memory banks. We concluded as a professional learning community that we all had many students who may have suffered the same side effect of Covid protocols and set out to find ways to increase engagement and higher order questioning with peers in order to facilitate higher order learning for our higher achievers who had not seen as much growth the first semester.  

    Over the course of my career, I have deepened my understanding of cognitive learning theories and how they impact daily instructional practices from surface level knowledge that they exist to applying them to solve problems of achievement for individual or subpopulations of students. Whether it is an acronym used to aid students in a writing process or using relationships between known concepts to provide background for novel concepts, there is plenty of research and science behind why these practices are crucial to student success in not only rote learning but applied problem solving skills. The wealth of knowledge available about cognitive learning theories can be overwhelming and take years to thoroughly embrace as a foundation block of what creates an exceptionally resourceful teacher. 

Comments

  1. Dan LomaxJune 7, 2021 at 7:52 AM

    I appreciate your willingness to self-reflect and examine possible avenues of growth like the CLT details you have included. Keep this up! Well Done!

    ReplyDelete

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