Personal Theory of Learning Reflection:

When I think back on my personal theory of learning, I realize that it is a blend of all the different theories. I do feel that I need less behaviorism; I need to find a quick way to cover rules and procedures so that I will have more time to move toward the social learning theory. I am weakest on each end of the learning continuum. A blending of theories is still the best way to meet the needs of all my students as they come to me at varying levels and abilities.

The most immediate change that I am going to make is to recreate the effort rubric on page 157 of our text (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski, 2007). It will be stored in a central server so that each student will have access. I will ask them to resave it onto their individual servers. As we work with this document, they will save it back to the central server into a folder that I create for each of them. Each week, they will re-evaluate themselves and save it by the date. After the second week, we will start discussing how to transfer this information into a chart or bar graph so they can view their progress (or lack of). I expect to have charts completed and printed in time for parent teacher conferences in October.

The second change I make is for me because if I improve my planning, then the students will improve their learning. I intend to make use of the four planning questions on page 10. While my lessons are long and detailed well enough that anyone can walk into my room and take over (district requirement), I feel that detailing my strategies will create more learning opportunities for my students (Pitler, Hubbell, Kuhn & Malenoski, 2007).

The long-term goal that I am setting for myself is to bring more opportunities for social learning into my classroom using voice thread and virtual tours. After time spent exploring different virtual tours, I would like my ELL students to create a virtual tour of their own. I want them to see what they have to offer to the world through their own culture.

This course has reinforced many of the theories and strategies that I already use in my room. However, it also made me painfully aware of the opportunities to use technology of which I am not taking advantage.

Resources:

Pitler, H., Hubbell, E., Kuhn, M., & Malenoski, K. (2007). Using technology with classroom instruction that works. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.