Big Idea: Children are sent to school to receive an education. Parents are excited for their kids to go so that they will begin to learn many important skills and knowledge that will help them get through life. They view the school as the agent for success for their children, and expect it to follow through on the promise of a good education. The school has many different ways that is can help children learn.
Activity: Class can offer many different types of things. Three ways that teachers can help students learn in school are: 1) Using the school setting to teach basic social skills and character traits. Teachers have a big responsibility to hammer things like responsibility, integrity, and manners into kids because if not they will most likely be underdeveloped in this area if allowed to run free at school. 2) Teachers can use different types of tools to teach the students. These tools can be various systems of counting, mnemonic techniques, algebraic symbol systems, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams, maps, all sorts of conventional signs and so on. These tools will expand students minds and increase their learning capacity. 3) Teachers can let students work together. This helps create social skills with peers which is a valuable asset. It also lets students realize that they can accomplish even more in life when working together, and it improves the over all development.
Reflection: These activities of learning are based off of Vygotsky's sociocultural theory. I personally really do agree with these ways of learning for students. It seems like it covers a wide variety of learners with the different tools and it also helps expand students range of learning by allowing them to share ideas and collaborate in groups. Lastly, it stresses the importance school has on basic social skills of students. This is something that is extremely important and is often over looked when teachers are becoming teachings. These are things taught in schools, which means right now we as future teachers should be practicing these good behavioral models as well.
I think that this really covers the main themes of the reading on sociocultural theory. There are three major themes: Individual development has its origins in social sources, human action/interaction occurs through symiotics, and that the first two themes are best seen analyzed during times of change and development. I think that the first two themes are especially displayed well in your diagram. The first one is displayed well because you talked about making the classroom a setting for social skills. The second one is displayed well because you talked about using different tools and techniques to get the lessons across. I think that your third point (allowing students to work together) fits in with the first major theme of sociocultural theory, which is individual development originates in social sources). I think however that it could also connect with the last theme, which is saying it is best to analyze learning through times of change/development. Connecting your diagram with the last theme better would be my only critique point. This could be done by saying that allowing students to work together in group discussion is helping the teacher analyze thru times of change because the students are used to learning directly from the teacher, but they are now having to be more independent and rely on each other.
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