IDE 621 KB by Soboleva Violetta
Social learning theory is human's nature made in theory. Mastery or apprenticeship theories are what people have had over the centuries, but Social Learning theory invented the name for it. A surprising fact is that a Russian scientist, Vygotsky, contributed to Cognitivism and Social Learning theory and his invention of Zone of Proximate development. I learned it for the first time while studying for a bachelor degree, and this idea was pretty natural for me - use others' help when you are not able to complete the task on your own, for example, teacher's or peer's help. However, the idea that no one did like that before made me feel weird, so I started reflecting on SL theory and all of them together.
Going deep into educational theory and its origins, one more theorist would establish the same principles, and it was Komensky back in the XVII century. And now, in the XXI century, we use SL theory as a central principle of learning as it helps to develop soft skills while working on skills related to the content itself. So learning its principles enabled me to understand what we are doing as teachers and why we are doing it. At the same time, getting evidence that this theory is not new in education, but something that found some theoretical basis started being called "Social learning theory", and has been used both among people and animals, makes me feel that modelling and learning in groups are things that natural for people.
It is impossible any theory separately from others, as they all are parts of people's nature - biologically, cognitively, socially, therefore I believe that only using their parts all together for teaching practice can help to reach educational outcomes, but having knowledge about all of them helps to use them properly depending on the situation as well as analyzing and improving my own content and teaching performance.