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.
- Basic understanding of Working Memory and it's limitations.
- How Long-term Memory and Working Memory connect in the process of learning.
- Basic understanding of schema and how it connects to learning
- A nuanced approach to learning transfer.
- The difference between Learning and Engagement.
- How and why Retrieval Practice is so important.
- How spacing works with retrieval to make a powerful learning combination.
- How to interleave information to help students work with higher level thinking skills.
- Elaboration strategies and why they work.
- Metacognition, how and why we should teach this along side our everyday curriculum.
Requirements
- None
Description
Purpose:
This course is designed for a broad audience, including teachers, students, and parents, who wish to deepen their understanding of learning processes and enhance both their teaching and learning experiences. It draws on essential principles from cognitive science and psychology to explore the science of learning, offering insights applicable across various subjects, from reading and math to science and language learning.
The course aims to demystify these principles, bridging theory with practical application to make them accessible and beneficial. We will cover several key concepts:
Working Memory: Understanding how we temporarily hold and process information.
Long-Term Memory: Exploring the mechanism for storing and retrieving information over time.
Learning Transfer: Examining the process of moving learning from one context to another.
Schema: Investigating how we organize and structure knowledge.
Student Engagement: Exploring how we maintain learners' interest and participation and comparing and contrasting that to learning.
Retrieval Practice: The process of actively recalling information and why that is important.
Spacing: The benefits of distributing learning over time.
Interleaving: Mixing different topics or subjects to improve learning.
Meta-cognition: Awareness and understanding of one's own thought processes and how that can be an effective learning tool.
Dual Coding: Using both verbal and visual information to aid understanding.
Elaboration: Enhancing learning by adding details or creating connections.
Concrete Examples: Using real-world examples to support learning.
Through these lessons, I aim to connect theoretical insights with practical strategies, making them relevant and actionable for enhancing educational experiences.
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.