Chapter 7 Learning Log

What? Chapter 7 talked about how schooling and our outside influences shape our understanding of different things. Students must come up with their own understanding about everything. Making students understand one thing all in the same way will never work. We all think and learn things differently, therefore, we all remember and process things in different ways. The way I remember one thing can be totally different than they way someone else remembered even though we experienced the same thing. I really liked the activity in class where we all had to decide on a definition for a chair. Something that would seem so simple was extremely hard to define. Everyone had their own opinions on what a chair is and what it should be. We split up into groups and had different things to define. I noticed that there are certain things you can agree on. One group had a triangle and it is rather difficult to argue what a triangle is. However, family, fairy tale, maturity and things like that are hard to come to a definition that everyone would agree on.

So What? The thing I really learned is that teaching will never be an easy task. We need to be able to modify our teaching so that many different people can learn the information. We cannot teach one lesson and expect all the students to have our same knowledge about that subject. We will need to ask questions and really make sure that they know what we have taught before we can move on.

Now What? I think every time I am planning a lesson I need to keep in mind all the different students I will have in class. It would be great if I could come up with a lesson that would address all different types of learning so they can all learn at once. Since that won't happen very often I need to be open to helping struggling students on an individual basis so they too will be able to learn at their pace.