Activity: My activity is show and tell. This involves asking the students to bring in as aspect of their life they find interesting and would like to share with the class. The teacher can ask for the item to be related to the material being covered in class. Students are then connecting their experiences/ interests to new material.
Reflection:
My diagram shows that learning happens when students are able to connect new information to past experiences or stories. This is true because our knowledge of this world is based on schemas. We draw up conclusions and judgements about every situation based on our experiences that relate at all to that situation. New information can add additional knowledge onto our schema or alter our preconceived notion of a schema.
My activity is show and tell. I think this activity relates to my theory because students are bringing in something that interests them and says something about their life and past experiences. They are sharing and communicating their schema of something to the teacher and the class. This could also be taken a step farther and the teacher could make a themed show and tell. This means asking the children to bring something that relates to the material the class is currently learning. The material would become more meaningful when the students are able to directly connect it to their own life. This activity is especially important for the teacher because the teacher can learn more about a child's background knowledge. By knowing more about a child's background knowledge a teacher can see what connections this child is basing things you teach off of. The better a teacher gets to know his/her students, the better they can communicate and build lesson plans to better fit to their students' schema of this world.
Madi,
ReplyDeleteI really like your thinking on this topic, especially where the teacher creates a themed show and tell and tries to better communicate with the students.
The one thing that I would critique about your thoughts, though, is in the first paragraph when you said, ". . .our knowledge of this world is based on schemas." I would change this because everything we know about this world is not soley based on schemas. There are other aspects that add in. For example, you said "that learning happens when students are able to connect new information to past experiences or stories." However, in the social cognitive theory we learn that students can learn new behaviors based off of the reaction they get from others. Therefore, they are learning in receiving feedback in a sense from others actions, not information.
Other than that though, I really like your ideas!