Module 4

Chapter 9 introduced the concept of learning strategies and something I found interesting was teaching students "how to learn". Usually, we think of teachers teaching students subjects, not necessarily teaching them how to learn. There are a series of steps teachers must follow to achieve this goal, and one of them is not teaching students how to memorize. I know from experience, memorizing is only good for an upcoming exam but in the long run; you lose it. It is said that students must:

1) Be cognitively engaged and have to focus attention on important aspects of the material.

2) Invest effort, make connections, elaborate, translate, invent, organize, and reorganize in order to think and process deeply.

3) Regulate and monitor their learning (Woolfolk, p320).

Basically there is more to learning than memorizing. That's a lot of steps and as teachers we need to be aware of them. Utilizing a variety of learning strategies benefits students in many ways such as higher GPA’s; students learn self-regulatory knowledge and useful schemas, among many more. Teachers that just do the traditional lecture and taking notes strategy is boring. I never really learned anything, because I just memorized the notes. Teachers those are more active in the classroom and use strategies such as setting goals and timetables to help with planning. Or using concept mapping and creating examples to utilize comprehension are helpful for students to "learn how to learn". 

Chapter 10's focus on cooperative learning was pretty important. Cooperative learning is defined as "students working together, for one class period to several weeks, to achieve shared learning goals and complete jointly specific tasks and assignments"(Woolfolk, p373). When first reading up on cooperative learning, I had always thought it was just group work. From my own classroom experience, I have always hated group projects. Teachers usually just randomized students together and most of the time, one student did all the work. People usually didn't get along or it was just a total mess. I would rather have worked on things on my own. Cooperative learning however is not randomized group work. But like any kind of group work, things can go wrong. Cooperative learning is goal orientated. Students are required to have a goal set in mind, so they can work with each other for support and guidance. By having structured learning groups, learning was described as more fun. As opposed to unstructured as what I have experienced lead to nothing. Some examples of structured cooperative learning were not only helping each other, but having assigned roles. That was really cool, because everyone had a role they played in the group. Some things were the encourager, cheerleader, coach, checker, recorder, and etc. This way everyone participates and no one has that excuse that there was nothing to do. If my teachers influenced cooperative learning in my school, I would too think learning was more fun. 

The one thing I thought was really interesting in Chapter 11 was self-efficacy. In the beginning chapters, I talked about teacher's self-efficacy. But this chapter goes more into depth about it, and it's quite interesting. Self-efficacy is not to be confused with self-esteem, as I initially thought they were the same. Self-efficacy is more about judgments of personal competence, while self- esteem is self-worth. This sounds almost the same, but who knew they were not? In fact they come hand in hand. A psychologist by the name of Albert Bandura categorized self-efficacy into four categories:

1) Mastery experiences- direct experiences such as past successes and failures. Success raises efficacy, and vice versa. 

2) Vicarious experiences- observing others those succeed in something that similar to your task or goal.

3) Social persuasion- Pep talk

4) Physiological arousal- something that makes you happy or anxiety (Woolfolk, p406).

Teachers and most people face these things everyday, so I think that it's important that as teachers we can't fall down. Our self-efficacy is said to grow from real success from our students. After all students see everything, and having an optimistic teacher makes a classroom environment a lot easier to learn and teach in.