Workshop 9

A) What's the meaning of the phrase "teachers must condition learners"?

It means that we, as teachers, can program our students in simple words, we determine the direction of learning through conditioning and stimulus: reward and punish.

B) Why do you think teachers must present the objetive of the class at the beginning of any activity?

We think that objectives must be presented at the beginning of the class to motivate the students, to guide them, to make them participants like an active part of the class.  With  this you will reach effective knoledge and learning at the same time.

C) Why do you think teachers must provide a challenging fearless enviroment? Refer to challenge and fear.

If we provide a challenge most of the students might feel overwhelmed but if we also provide safe enviroment like free of jokes or mocking we could obtain brilliant results like new ideas, discoveries or different points of view.

D) According to the video, in the constructivist and cognitivism approach, information is moved to long term memory.  What's the difference between the two approaches in this process?

Constructivism: info moves to long term memory while learners are involved in the process of creating their own knoledge based on experiences.
Cognitivism: this is a result of brain process, knoledge transfers from short to long memory, the student store information for later recall. and it is organized logically.


                                                   Behaviorism                      Cognitivism                   Constructivism

Teacher's rol                     Stimulator                        Attention getter organizer          model, guide           
                                                                                conductor and repeater              facilitator

Materials                     Flash cards, games               charts, diagrams, guides            creative outputs
                                                                                                                              proyect, presentations

Precursor                    Skinner                                      Vigotsky                            Vigotsky, Piaget
                                                                                                                              Bruner, Dewey

Cognitive Theories

Theories give us perspective, theories are like different view points, like multiple windows.  We can find 3 different perspectives:  Behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism.

Behaviourism:  This perspective sees mind as a black box where you put information.  Here learning are regular, expected responses and the way to instruct is by repetition and reinforcement, practice gives perfection.

Cognitivism:  This perspective sees mind as a computer a place to store information.  Learning is through a recall of information, tha is when learning occurs.  The instruction is to grab the attention and help the students make sense to that infomation.

Constructivism:  Sees mind as a rizhone, where all different skills are interconected, we learn building knowledge by doing (experience).  The instruction is to guide problem solving through skills.

There are two different types of skills

Descriptive theory: Which answers the question what learning is and how it happens? Learning theory describes learning as an outcome.
Learning theory: answers the question How do we help people learn?  The outcome is the instructional theory that gives methods to foster learning and prescribes ways to learn.