Ch. 10 Content Area Learning

As I was reading this chapter and came across the mathematics section, I have to agree with Mayer that the most basic type of knowledge involves resources or knowledge of basic facts and procedures. The second type of knowledge is general strategies for solving problems. I have taught math in the past and currently tutor fourth graders for their taks test and found that they missed the problem solving problems because they either add instead of subtracting, they didn't add, subtract, divide or multiply correctly, or didn't follow the strategies their teachers have taught them. How many of you have encountered this problem?

Neuroscience of Learning

As I was reading under Educational Issues, It talks about how brain research justifies the emphasis on early education. This brings to mind the things that are going on in this great state of ours with all the budget cuts in education. At my school we are losing two of the four pre kinder classrooms and going to half day for pre kinder. How many of you think that this will help our students in the future? Do you feel that edcuation needs to be cut? In my opinion the state is doing a major injustice to our students by cutting the education budget, only the future will show just how bad it impacted the students.

Chapter 11 Motivation

As I was reading this chapter alot of ideas came into mind. Especially when I came across the conceptions of ability. The chapter discuses two theories of intelligence: entity and incremental. When I taught a 5th grade math a couple of years ago I could see the different beliefs in the children I taught. I taught a lower level class where the students new they were at a lower level and had that attitude that they could not do the work I was teaching them. And then I had the higher leveled students who believe that they could do the work. As a teacher I tried my hardest to show the lower leveled students that they could do the work. My point is that the students I received were grouped based on their abilities and they knew that, so they would not strive to learn more or achieve better than their ability. I am asking the class have they ever encountered this problem and how did they motivate the students to do better in class?

Ch 7 Cognitive and Instruction

As I was reading this chapter under Research on Teaching and Teacher planning and decision making, many things kept on popping into my mind about how the decisions I made when I was trying to teach teachers how to used photo story in the classroom. I had to give a training to teachers and I had this plan in my mind on how I was going to deliver my instructions and everything would work out how I wanted it to. The teachers would learn how to use photo story fairly easy but then when I had my first session with teachers not everything went according to plan. Some motivational concerns I had to deal with were that some teachers were more tech savvy than others and some teachers had already used photo story, while others did not have a clue how to use it. To make a long story short, I had three sessions that day and I think my last session was the best one I delivered because I kept on modifying my teaching methods and took out things that didn't work and added things that did work. My question to the class is has anyone done this before in their instruction? Have you delivered a lesson to one class and found that if you tried a different approach with another class more students will understand the objective you are trying to teach?

Ch. 5 Cognitive Learning Processes

As I was reading the section under metacognition and learning I could not help myself but to think that we as teachers have taught our students to think or apply a certain strategy in reading or writing taks that goes along with metacognition. One strategy that we ask our students to follow is to read each question and find out what the question is trying to ask the student. We then have students classify each question whether it is an inference, or word meaning etc.. In writing we teach students strategies like Mr. sneaky, and looking for key words in the sentence that make it wrong. My question to you all is have you all used any of these strategies to help your students pass the TAKs test and our these forms of metacognition or am I totally wrong?

Ch. 4 Cognitive information Processing Theory

As I was reading this chapter many thoughts came to mind. First I was wondering how can we make our students remember what we taught in the the beginning of the year. Luckily I am in a science lab and students remember things by doing hands on experiments. But sometimes they forget what they did in the beginning of the year. How do we make what they learn in the beginning of the year stick in their long term memory? Right now I know of a teacher who is struggling with his students in math and he feels frustrated because his students took a bench mark and did very poorly. I tutor some of his students and when I am going over the questions they seem to know the answer but when they get a test and have to do it on their own they seem to fail. What can we do as teachers to help them grasp the information and make it go from their short term memory or working memory to their long term memory?

Conditioning Theries Ch. 2

Hi Classmates, as I was reading through this chapter I found that I have either done this in my classroom or seen teachers do this in their classrooms. For example praising students when they complete an assignment or answer a question in class. I also have rewarded students for positive behavior. Students will perform better if they are rewarded by praise or other positive stimuli. As I was reading about behavioral objectives I saw something that our school district is implementing right now. We have to state what the students are learning in student friendly language and have it written somewhere in our classroom for everyone to read. I find that if the students are told and shown what they are being taught then they will strive to master that objective. It gives the students a goal to aim at. Are any other districts doing this as well?