The philosophy I’ve explained below on learning and teaching is a living philosophy that grows and changes as I learn and experience more about learning. It is not a final draft nor do I suspect there will ever be a final draft of this type of document in my case.
Overview
In this philosophy I describe the learning process, a way to visualize that process, and then I outline some of the important roles of the learner and teacher. Based on those roles and educational psychology research, I discuss some of the instructional implications that I feel can directly help learning occur more effectively.
How I view learning
Learning is the process of acquiring, maintaining and refining knowledge, skills, behaviors and attributes through experience, study or instruction.
One way to visualize the above learning process is by comparing it to a feedback loop where the learner interacts with people (peers, instructors, coworkers, friends, or family), the environment, materials, etc., in formal and perhaps more commonly informal settings. These interactions are almost like sending out probes to those things from which we are learning and interacting. These probes result in responses being fed back to the learner. A series of these interactions can lead to the learner interpreting and incorporating the responses into knowledge, skills, behavior and attitudes. As these responses are integrated into the student’s existing cognitive and behavioral systems learning occurs.
Role of the learner
Whether we engage in the feedback process described above by interacting with others, our environment and learning materials, attending to the responses and integrating the perceptions into learning is the learner's choice. Based on this, there are significant roles that a student can take on to facilitate learning. I admit I do not know all of these roles or understand them completely but I believe five of them are:
Be motivated to learn
Take responsibility for learning
Engage in and attend to learning activities
Apply what is being learned
Share with or teach others what you have learned
One of the best evidences for learning is the ability to apply what we’ve learned and adapt to known and unknown situations; to question, analyze, create, and dig into real problems and situations and be able to contribute to them to reach a defined goal.
Teaching philosophy and role of the teacher
Learners can learn without teachers and even despite teachers. Some of the best learning occurs in this fashion. However I believe an effective teacher can catalyze the learning process, help students learn things that they might not otherwise discover on their own, and be a synergistic element in the learning process. My experience has taught me that the most effective teachers love their subject matter and love their students. I truly believe those are two fundamental ingredients that a teacher needs to impact learning. In addition an effective teacher has roles similar to that of a learner:
Take responsibility for helping students learn
Do all you can to motivate your students to want to learn
Establish clear relevant objectives and assessments aligned with those objectives
Create engaging, relevant learning activities
Help students gain a foundation in the content area and then apply what is being learned
Punctuate learning activities and application events with timely, relevant feedback
Consider learner characteristics and adapt accordingly
Instructional Implications
Based on some of the above roles I’d like to briefly describe a few implications for teaching that are founded in educational psychology theories that I believe support learning.
ARCS: This theory is important because it asks the teacher to consider the role of the learner and plan accordingly. For example, the teacher will ask and plan to the following questions. How will you capture and maintain learner attention and interest; how will you ensure learning outcomes are relevant to the learner (connect content to learner goals, interests and characteristics); how will you build learner confidence through examples of acceptable achievement and structuring lessons (announcing where students should be, what they should be doing, what they are responsible for, giving directions and providing organization, etc.); and how will you promote learner satisfaction through consistency, application of knowledge and recognition of success?
If you were to attempt to implement some of these ideas as a teacher you might consider capturing information regarding your learner’s characteristics, expectations, and goals through a survey, an open conversation or while playing a game and then trace activities and outcomes back to the learner as you teach and provide feedback based on the learning objectives and the learner’s goals. You might also consider at what points your students will begin to lose attention and interest and build in activities or breaks during those times. In addition you will do all you can to not just teach subject matter but rather teach students; to not just spew out content but truly help your students learn, apply and experience the subject matter. I like this example: http://techtv.mit.edu/collections/walterlewinvideos/videos/528-work---potential-energy-demo-lecture-11
Situated Learning (problem, situation, goal, or context based learning): As I have said I think that an effective approach to learning involves helping students gain a foundation in the content area and then apply what is being learned. In moving to the application stage situated learning can guide activities and teaching methods. For example, social interaction is a critical component of situated learning, particularly helping learners become involved in a "community of practice." However, situated learning is usually unintentional rather than deliberate. Therefore, one example of how a teacher could support situated learning is to take students through a process of 1) ensuring students have organized resources that they understand and know how to us; 2) using case studies and worked examples to give students a foundation in the subject matter and then 3) providing stories, real life situations, and problems that require the application of knowledge to come to some conclusion and 4) allowing learners to work together on the situation.
Reduce cognitive load (cognitive load theory): Cognitive theory states that the mind has a cognitive structure or pathway (working memory, long-term memory, coding, and recall) and that learning is more likely when conditions are aligned with how our mind functions. This is important because it helps the teacher understand guidelines for introducing new concepts, revisiting concepts, and applying concepts. This theory could guide the following types of teaching practices:
Present new material using non-redundant visual and audio sources (dual coding) and physically integrate sources of information when presenting new content to reduce cognitive load.
Build in spaced review as part of your class.
Build assessments and give feedback not only for grading purposes but as learning tools to review and apply material so that it is more likely to “make it” into long term memory where it can be drawn upon in the future.
Reduce unnecessarily repetitive information by reducing redundancy.
In working memory, we can keep track of about five items or chunks at a time. Because the size of a chunk can grow with learning and experience, the complexity of the tasks we have students undertake successfully also should grow. Work from simple to more complex tasks.
Feedback: Successful instruction nearly always includes performance-related feedback. I believe the two sigma problem (how to get tutor-like results with group instruction) reflects the importance of feedback since a tutor setting provides much more feedback to the learner. Teachers should provide appropriate feedback at the right time and in a variety of ways. For example, consider a student who answers a question with a voice inflection that reflects they are unsure of their answer. Research on feedback would help us know that this learner could benefit from elaborative feedback whereas a confident answer would be more supported by quick and succinct feedback. Also, I think there should be periodic feedback based on tracked data according to learner goals. Perhaps if students had some way in which assignments they wanted to participate in then the grades and feedback on those assignments would be more relevant. Feedback merits a much more lengthy discussion as far as my teaching philosophy goes but I feel it is integral part of good learning.
Personal Biases
My philosophy is impacted by my background in biology, acquiring a second language, and teaching 19-21 year old young men and women a second language.
It is further impacted by the current and past theories and research related to educational psychology, at least the ones I am aware of!
Epistemology
I think that epistemology should be suited to the learning objectives. At the same time I realize that most of us tend to have default theoretical tendencies and preferences. It is difficult for me to say that I am a constructivist, or cognitivist or behaviorist because depending on the learner and learning objectives I feel strongly about each one. For instance, consider a learning situation for a SWAT team member. If they need to learn to naturally execute tasks based on many different stimuli, I could see myself leaning toward a somewhat behavioristic approach to begin. However once the foundation is in place and the SWAT team member is trained to react to the most common stimuli they'll encounter, I would then like to turn to a more cognitive/constructivist view and help the students see the principles behind those responses so that when they encounter new situations they can reason through them and think like an expert. With that said as I really think about my view of learning I would say my default tendencies lie more within the realm of constructivism.
My philosophical goals: study more Piaget, read more on learning theories and study the "Survey of Instructional Development Models" (Gustafson, Branch)
The table below is a summary of behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. It is based on an Ertmer & Newby article. An interesting activity is to read through some of the definitions and features of each perspective and see which resonate with you.
Ertmer, P., Newby, T. 1993. Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Contructivism: Comparing Critical Features from an Instructional Design Perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly. Vol. 6(4), 50-72.