PLE Chapter 6

What are the essential skills and/or learning outcomes you want your students to know and be able to do that relate to cognitive learning? 

In my classroom, I want my students to be able to think about subject matter in ways that will help them remember. Asking them to provide examples allows each child to come up with their own example, and this will help them remember. I also want my students to be able to pick out the most important things to learn and to understand why they are important. Obviously, a student cannot remember everything he/she reads or hears, so picking out important things is important. I could give them guiding questions when they read a story so they can see what kind of questions will help them find the main ideas. Eventually, I want my students to be able to come up with their own questions.

Students need to make sense of the concepts I am teaching. Relating such concepts to their experience will help them make more sense of it. Having group discussions allows for the students to discuss and express their ideas/experiences. They will also learn a lot from each other. 

I want my students to recognize their attention span and to realize when they are zoning out. This is difficult to do, but it is important for the learner to commit as much time as possible to a concept in order to learn it. I want my students to be able to catch themselves when they get off task and be able to get back on task. 

Last, I want students to come to conclusions on their own. I don't want to teach at them; I want to teach with them. If I force ideas on them and make them spit back certain answers, they will not learn. They need to construct ideas in their head and come up with solutions on their own. They will be able to do this throughout their lives and will be able to learn a great deal more. 

This is a video of a professor from the University of Sydney talking about deep learning and how if we throw too much information at students they won't learn it. It's not the most exciting video because it's a video of one of his lectures, but if you listen to what he says you will learn a lot for your classroom! :)
Deep Learning