In this chapter by Michael Schneider and Elsbeth Stern, the authors present some findings in the field of the cognitive research of learning. Ten different points are explained related to acquisition and understanding skills and methodologies. These points try to show different perspectives in order to create an environment in which the learning process develops.
The authors start focusing on the learner as the most important person in the classroom and how teachers have to use their pedagogical knowledge to make the educational context more efficient by taking into account the concept prior knowledge, referring to what students already know and its importance to develop learning processes. Thus, each one’s students’ backgrounds is different and teachers have to be really careful with previous students’ conceptions because new explanations before fully understanding the concepts that should have been learnt before may create a cognitive conflict.
This chapter also refers to the importance of learning concepts, skills and metacognitive competence, understanding this last one as the reflection of the students about their own knowledge acquisition processes. Meta-cognition will help learners to evaluate and improve their acquisition and use of knowledge. Equally, when teaching, we have to take into account that each individual has his/her own hierarchical organization of knowledge and learning environments must be really well-structured. Moreover, it is really important to make sure that both students and teacher know the learning goals.
Moreover, the paper focuses on the concepts working memory and long-term memory, being the first one where information is actively processed and the latter one where this information is stored. It emphasizes on how not all the information we process is stored in our long term memory and how teachers should make information more meaningful by linking it to the student’s prior language and motivating them. Thus, the author introduces the concept motivation and its correlation to emotion as important determinants of learning which vary from one learner to another. In order to motivate students, we can orient the different topics to the point in which concepts and competences are seen as useful and relevant by the learner for his/her life. Finally, the authors claim that learning requires time and effort for both students and teachers
Once we have pointed out the different parameters related to the teaching and learning process, I am going to relate some of them to personal situations and my experience in the field of education; specially about last year, when I worked as Spanish TA at Kalamazoo College, Michigan. At first, I was really worried about having the responsibility of teaching people who are around my age and even older but, since I had just finished my degree in education two months before starting to teach in the United States, I had already pedagogical instruction. Therefore, I already knew that I had to link my explanations to the previous knowledge the learners had although, on the contrary, at the beginning it was very difficult because of the different background that my students were exposed to. However, I tried to motivate all of them by using different resources and media related to possible differences when acquiring knowledge (visual memory, auditory memory, kinesthetic memory and so on) and, in this way, every student had a task with which they felt more confident. At the same time, I looked for making them realize about these tasks and competences in order to make them understand which metacognitive competences work better for them.
As I tried to have everything as much planned as I could, planning and timing the lessons took me a long time. However, sometimes the main interest of the class is diverted to another topic and the whole schedule that was already organized has to change and adapt to the new needs created by the students.
In addition, in order to make students understand and assimilate the contents and skills, I used to repeat the most important information and tasks and relate them to real-life situations. Thus, since we already know that frequently-recurring information and competences that are useful for their lives are acquired better and faster, I always tried to give examples that were close to their daily lives or personal-anecdotal experiences which really called their attention.
Nonetheless, as I pointed out above, there are cases in which all your organization for a lesson plan does not work as well as expected and you have to change it in that specific moment without having too much time to think about it. This “improvisation” was really difficult for me at the beginning when I was less experienced; but, as weeks went by, I saw myself more capable to create different ways or explanations that maybe did not come to my mind when I was planning the lesson at home.
After having shown the main points of this chapter and share some aspects from my personal experience, we can point out the complexity that the teaching-learning context involves and how individuals’ needs and characteristics must be taken into account when planning on teaching a group of students.
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