Sunday, December 9, 2007

Cognitive Module

"Cognitive learning results when information is stored in long-term memory in an organized way." As teachers, this is the type of learning that we strive for. We want to teach our students skills that they can remember, use, and apply to everyday life for years and years to come. The key to allowing students to store information into their long-term memory is to teach according to their liking and learning style. The challenge we face every single day is to plan lessons to make this happen for each and every student we have.
I personally do not have the best memory and find it hard to remember things that have no direct value to me. I do remember from school, however, group projects, lessons applied to real-life situations, and theories I founded by my own research. Because these are the things that I still remember from years ago, I use them in my instruction today hoping they will work for my students as well.
Starting with group projects, I always found them to be fun, engaging, and beneficial to learning. Sometimes, the best way to learn is from your peers. Working together as a group to find solutions help my students to feel more comfortable, important, and active. Weeks later, when I reference to that topic, they automatically remember it, the solutions they came up with, and who they worked with to find it! As for real-life lessons, as soon as I am able to make a connection between solving an equation on paper, and solving an equation to find a real life value, my students are instantly engaged and more open to learning and remembering the process they used to solve it. Lastly, individual research also always proves to be influential for cognitive learning. If I give my students a topic or mathematician to research, down the line, they remember certain things about it because they had to find out the information for themselves, and feel accomplished after doing so.
The most rewarding aspect of teaching is being able to send our students out in the world with an education and with skills to succeed in life. Children need to participate in their own learning experience if you want true education to occur. Being that learning is such a complex procedure, us teachers need to facilitate the learning so that students are able to “code, transform, rehearse, store, and retrieve information.”