Utilizing What We Know About How People Learn

Introduction

Learning is done with or without a teacher. In fact, we’ve all learned what not to do because of how observant we are as humans. Teachers can make an incredible impact on the guidance of how people learn, but we should always remember that teachers are not the only person who can direct learning. Family and others who are close to a student can also direct learning. The comfort and relevance that family can bring to learning can be major factors to increasing a student’s desire to learn new skills and grow. Students will also guide themselves in skills that they want to learn, especially with the accessibility of technology for learning. Videos and social media are often easily available for learning new skills and many people are willing to share their skills.

As teachers, we should incorporate all the senses and experiences that can help with learning to provide opportunities for students to make meaning of their world. Certainly, we can consider giving students opportunities to learn through direct experiences and vicarious experiences. Direct experiences are those in which a student can interact with a situation and be immediately involved in responding to people or a stimulus. Vicarious experiences are those that they can observe other people having the interaction with people or stimuli. The social interaction of technology, including short videos of people sharing their lives, allows for a lot of vicarious experiences that help people learn and develop a way to interact.

The National Research Council (National Research Council, 2000) has collected findings from many studies around schools, students, teaching, and cognition. A new emphasis on how learning occurs has transformed pre-conceived notions about children and students and how they make meaningful connections to the interactions and experiences in the world. We will need to uncover more about the differences between understanding facts and having useable knowledge. Information is readily available to many Americans through internet searches, social media, and videos of people sharing tutorials. Useable knowledge is the key to producing students who can navigate how to solve problems and make decisions.

Schools can become large systems that condition students on how to function throughout their day. The structure of schools can result in seemingly universal behaviors, like raising your hand to ask a question, that continue throughout our lives in all situations that resemble school. We know that some behaviors that are needed in the workforce can be taught in schools, and we rely on schools to also teach students how to approach problems and find solutions. There continues to be research on how the brain works, but also on how education works, and some of the most influential research comes from teachers who observe patterns of learning with their students.

Objectives of this chapter:

• 1.

  Describe learning theories for teachers and students

• 2.

  Describe approaches to teaching and learning

• 3.

  Apply the principles of teaching and learning

• 4.

  Apply teacher behaviors that influence student achievement

• 5.

  Describe student needs and individual differences

Describe Learning Theories For Teachers And Students

We will begin with an introduction to some of the theories on how children learn. As teachers, we should consider how students learn and that there is often a complex system of how students are processing information. Teaching is never as easy as simply telling students the right way to do something because the students need to be ready to learn. This section will briefly introduce four common theories that are used in schools to help students and teachers (Cohen & Waite-Stupiansky, 2017). These theories are incorporated by the many teachers that may see a student in a day and can be used to guide learner development.