Week 9-Motivation: How Can Learning Be Effectuated By a Teacher?

Based on this weeks reading and topic, I believe that a teacher must create a comfortable and inviting learning environment for all students. This environment should encourage students to be curious, ask questions, and participate without feeling threatened.

Personally, I try to be friendly and open to my students. I also try to foster respect in classroom relationships and create a safe, non-threatening learning environment. However, I still have students who seem unmotivated, afraid to participate in classroom activities, or even ask for help. I am continually asking myself, how you motivate the unmotivated? Any thoughts or suggestions?

Week 9-Motivation: What is Learning?

To enhance my definition of learning, I would add that learning is finding answers to questions about what is not known. If you have questions you are motivated to seek out answers, and this in turn helps to expand the mind and its functional abilities.

I have always wondered how you motivate unmotivated students, and after studying this weeks reading, I wonder if the answer to this question is creating curiosity. It seems like a lot of unmotivated students, have little interest and lack curiosity about the unfamiliar. If they lack curiosity, they are less likely to be motivated to ask questions, or to ask for help.

Week 8, Human Development-How can a teacher effectuate learning?

I think it is important for a teacher to present students with various and challenging learning opportunities that allow students to use the cognitive skills that they posses at their operational level, and that will stretch those abilities. By stretching these abilities they can start transitioning into more advanced operational stages. Refering back to the example of my four year old daughter (see previous post), my wife and I are trying to challenge my daughters current abilities so that she can start to transition into concrete operations. We are trying to accomplish this by teaching her concepts such as sharing with others. Sharing can be hard for her sometimes, but when she does, we try to show her how it makes others happy and how rewarding it can be to help other people be happy. By teaching her the concept of sharing, she is able to start looking outside of herself, and see things from other perspectives. This whole process that we are taking her through is stretching her current abilities and helping her to progress toward more concrete operations.

Week 8, Human Development- What is Learning?

Based on what I have learned about the different operational stages that come with age, I would say learning is the development of the mind and the processes it uses to grasp new information. When contemplated, it really is interesting to see how the capacity of the human mind develops from a sensory-motor stage, learning by exploring physical surroundings, to a formal operational stage, with the ability to analyze and comprehend abstract material. I see this occurring in my two daughters who are two and four. I see my four year old in the preoperational stage, being self-centered and still trying to learn how to see things from others viewpoints. My wife and I are trying to teach her how to sympathize with others and see the world from outside of herself. She is coming along with this, and the more she develops, the more enjoyable she is. I see my two year still doing a lot of exploring with the physical world around her. She is so eager to learn about everything, and wants to do everything that her older sister can do. I really enjoy seeing her in this stage. To her everything is so new and exciting, and this is how I think the process of learning should be.