The brush of your steps.

                This chapter covers a lot of technologies that allow us to improve learning in the classroom. Some of the key components that a lot of the technologies seem to focus on are: ·          the understanding of what the student knows before the interactions, ·          what erroneous preconceived notions he has (conceptual barriers), ·          and implementing methods that experimentally have shown to tackle these conceptual barriers and achieve basic learning. These technologies have different uses and applications in learning, which is generally not attributed to the development of new learning theories, but rather to the core benefits of technology in general. Firstly, communication is one of those huge benefits new technology has brought along. One of the benefits of that in education is in the pos...

This chapter addressed the effectiveness of teaching in three common fields in elementary, middle, and high schools. These fields were History, Mathematics, and Science. It was very explicit and provided examples on how being an effective teacher does not mean that one can teach every field, and that the most successful teachers are actually incredibly resourceful and proficient in their field. Further, their skills are tailored to the specific field in which they teach. They retouched on some examples of History we had seen before, and how it can be a field to learn facts in, or a field where you study and interpret certain events in order to deduce what actually occurred in history. The example of Bob Bain struck home quite quickly in the sense that I was really disappointed in my experiences in History throughout school. I had never experienced a professor like him or Ms. Kelsey, whose strategies seem to actually engage these students in a historical adventure which I now seem to...

                This chapter was very interesting in tackling four concepts which I will explain in moderate detail to tackle the idea of learning and the effect the environment can have on that. The first type of environment (and it is often noted that none of these environments is exclusive of the others) is learner centered. In this environment it is important to recognize where the student is coming from. This is not strictly cultural, but also involves previous learned knowledge from past grades, and any other factors outside of the classroom which contribute to his/her experiences. This idea has been proven to be significant with experiments asking students to relate home experiences to their current work, and it thereby improving test performance on reading. While focusing on the environment may be essential, it is very difficult to determine what is stored as experiences. To narrow that down, knowledge – centered environments (the ...

                 Tread carefully when applying theories that you believe about the brain to learning. A lot of the myths that are quickly debunked in the chapter often have an effect on learning strategies for students that may not actually benefit them. It is important to look at the brain and focus on what we are most certain about, as this is what will benefit our learning. First and foremost, we have an understanding about the structure of our brain and how it is formed. Like a sculpture artist who starts with a block and ends with Abraham Lincoln, our brain too has over produced synapses, and essentially keeps the ones we use. This would be supported by why it is so much easier to learn languages when we are children. Further, the other way the brain’s connections are formed are from nothing. As we learn, it seems to be the case that experience creates new synapses where they were none previously, and this is incredibly fascinating be...

Why do they teach students reading, writing, and mathematics before they teach them how to eat? Think about that as I go through a review of this chapter to lead to my point. Learning in schools involves the core concept of abstracting knowledge to make it transferrable to other scenarios, mainly, as the chapter concludes, to everyday life. Transfer is the process through which you learn something bigger than mathematics or something bigger than that physics problem. Some would argue it is the overall increase in understanding. In order to achieve this transfer, one must have the passion and desire to do these things. This is where we should start most of teaching, in motivation. The study and understanding of how to create motivation in students is particularly, what, to me, makes a great lecture. Learning requires an in depth understanding of the representation of knowledge in the human brain. This understanding will allow you to make better connections with your students, and to re...

This chapter evaluates the ideas and thought processes that go through in an expert’s mind in order to better understand the idea of education and teaching. It then correlates that with effective teachers (noting that expertise in a field does not make you an expert teacher in that field), a nd how understanding ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ is of upmost importance for effective teaching. In short, we need to understand how the students we are teaching are thinking and what knowledge they bring to the table in order to allow them to understand new content. This ability to understand new content however comes with a condition. In order for a student to truly understand new material, he must understand the breadth and depth of his own knowledge. It is the path to this understanding that takes students from being novices to experts. As the chapter so brilliantly illustrates, experts use to be those who knew all the answers, or could at least fake to do so, but that was flawed in its ve...

I am reading the book How People Learn and writing reviews which are encouraged to have your thought on the chapter, which makes me love writing these. Here's my first one, the next ones to come will just be the small summary and my thoughts: It has become evident in education that learning by teaching the facts and assuming every student is equal is a flawed approach. The understanding of what the student knows, and his ideas about the subject matter are of incredible importance prior to introducing new material for learning. Learning is not a process of filling a glass with lemonade, but rather mixing the glass that may have some ingredients, but lacks the remaining, with what it is missing, and possibly removing ingredients that are not needed, to make the lemonade. It is this process that will create a lasting impression on the student. The first chapter of the paper expresses its subjects in a very orderly manner, tackling education in general at first, and then the actual ...