Foundations of Teaching and Learning
What you'll learn
- Teaching strategies based on high quality replicated studies that educators can use in their daily teaching.
- Basics of Working Memory and it's limitations.
- How Long-term Memory and Working Memory connect in the process of learning.
- What is Schema and how it connects to learning.
- Near vs. Far Transfer, what it means, and how it works.
- The important difference between Learning and Engagement.
- How and why Retrieval Practice is so important.
- How spacing works with retrieval to make a powerful learning combination.
- What and how to interleave information to help students work with higher level thinking skills.
- Why we should start learning with concrete examples and move towards abstract examples.
- Elaboration strategies and why they work.
- How Dual Coding helps us make more connections and also helps us understand Cognitive Load and how to avoid it.
- Metacognition, how and why we should teach this along side our everyday curriculum.
Requirements
- None
Description
Purpose:
This course is created by a teacher for anyone who is interested in bettering their understanding of how we learn. My purpose for creating this course is twofold, first for teachers and second for parents and students.
First, for teachers. This is my attempt at providing a useful and relevant professional development opportunity for teachers with topics that are at the foundation of learning. Many of these topics and ideas are not new but do form a foundational aspect of how we learn, but they don't receive much if any time in our professional development experience. In this course, I will present concepts that I have directly gleaned from the research on learning, but have also been shown to work in the classroom. On top of that, I have personally implemented these concepts in my teaching, following the research and recommendations, and found they offered great benefits to both my teaching and the student's learning. To be clear though, these topics don't work because of my anecdotal experience, but because they are based on what we know about how learning works in the brain, and they have been tested and still continue to be tested in rigorous ways both inside and outside the classroom.
My second purpose is to provide a place for parents and students to come and find useful information to help guide their understanding of learning. Learning isn't confined to schools and classrooms, so the information about learning should not be confined to school either. Too often though, that is the case. Beyond that, schools (in general) don't usually do a good job of working with parents and students to explain what learning is and how it works. I want to provide a place where some simple understandings and guiding principles can help anyone understand more about learning.
Who this course is for:
- Education students
- Beginner teachers
- Advanced teachers
- Administrators
- Parents interested in understanding more about learning
- Parents interested in helping find better ways to help their students learning
- Students intersted understanding more about how they learn
- Adult learners
- Anyone who is intersted in learning more about how they learn.
Instructor
I have over 20 years of experience working as a professional teacher all around the world. From rural Philippines, to inner-city Chicago, to Private Well Funded Schools with unlimited resources, the classrooms and students I have experienced have been diverse both culturally and socioeconomically.
After I got my master's degree in Teaching, I started to ask questions about my education. Questions that I wasn't finding satisfactory answers for in my everyday teaching and learning experiences. Since then I have been on a journey to find a deeper understanding of learning for myself and the students I teach. I have found this in the Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Neuroscience that surround "how we learn". As I continue to learn useful things that enhance my teaching and learning I seek ways to share these powerful tips with others.