Blog Entry 1 - January 30, 2015
How does knowledge of the way people learn related to the experience of being a teacher?
In this course I have learned that students learn in three different ways. 1.Auditory - student learn by hearing, 2. Kinesthetic - students learn by doing, hands on, and 3. Visually - students learn by seeing. The majority(65%) of students are visual learners. I am beginning my volunteer work in a 6th grade classroom and look forward to seeing how the teacher helps students of different learning abilities understand the concept she is teaching.
I currently work in a 7th grade classroom for math. The teacher stands at the front of the classroom and ask students what a right, isosceles triangle is? She gets approximately four students who can answer the question without anything visually written on the board. Then she draws a triangle with one right angle and two angles that are each 45 degrees. At that point she has the majority of the classes attention. By drawing the triangle, they can visually see that two angles are the same at 45 degrees. This makes an isosceles triangle. They also see where the 90 degree box is drawn in the corner and it reminds them that this is a right triangle.
Even though she has captured a majority of the class, she did not capture the whole class. Each student has a math notebook. In their notebook, she has them draw out the different types of triangles, the angles, the sides, the names, and anything else about triangles they need to know at 7th grade. Once they have written down all their notes, she hands each one of them a bag with different length straws. They take three straws and try to construct different shape triangles. Once they have the triangles created, they measure the sides and are able to write down what kind of a triangle they have created.
In this lesson, the teacher has used all three learning models to teach the students about triangles. The teacher would have to understand how students learn, to be able to create a lesson, where all the students can understand the concept. She created three different ways for students to understand triangles. To be a good teacher, you need to understand that not all students are the same and be able to create lessons that will teach students in a way they can understand.
