Week 5-Meaningful Learning: How can learning be best effectuated by a teacher/trainer

A teacher should constantly be making connections between students' existing knowledge and the knowledge needed to learn something new. A teacher can do so by learning as much as possible about what each student already knows and has experienced. Instruction should then be adjusted accordingly in order to make meaningful connections between existing knowledge and new knowledge. Once these connections are made, the teacher should allow the student to use these connections in a number of different learning contexts. For example, if I want to teach my students time management and organizational skills for school, I need to find out what experiences my students have had in the past in managing or organizing something. Most students have had to clean or organize their room at home. Using this knowledge, I can make a connection of how organizing a room can be similar to organizing and managing school work, projects, and activities. I can then expose my students to different situations, where they can practice using what they have learned about time management and organizational skills. Examples of such situations could include having them create a calender of their upcoming week at school or creating a plan breaking down a big project into tasks and setting due dates for each task.