The Changing Teaching Profession and The Learning Process

Hello people!

Welcome back to the blog!

So after my previous post about the contents of the book called "Educational Psychology" by Kelvin Seiferd and Rosemary Sutton, here is the resume or summary of the first and second chapter.

Chapter 1: The Changing Teaching Profession and You.

So, there's a very common question about teaching. It's mostly "What's so good in teaching? What's the Joy?" Well the answer will be quite simple. As it was described in the book, there are many answer for that question but here's some of the answer from the book:

• To witness the diversity of growth in young people, and their joy in learning.
• To encourage lifelong learning - both for yourself or for others.
• To experience the challenge of devising and doing interesting, exciting activities for the young.

Every students have their own diversity, whether it's their ethnic background, their financial, their first or second language and so on. But however the particular students are, they will always have potential as human being that possibly haven't been notice by society. A teacher's job is to help particular young people to realize their potential.

The complexity of classroom life guarantees that teaching will never needs to get boring. An exciting and new things are bound to happen the least you expect it. Students show an something you never expected to see, or maybe the otherwise- fail to show what you thought they had. An activity gets better or even worse and you will eventually understand why a particular students behave as they do, and you begin to think of how to respond the students' behavior in the future. Also, after teaching the same particular learning material for several times, you realize that you could understand it differently than you used to. The job of being a teacher never stays the same, it evolves continually.

But teaching won't be a good thing all the time, there are challenges teachers would face and sometimes will gain a frustration. Students can be very unfriendly, unmotivated, or happened not to learn much from the learning activities. You will, however, be responsible for being and remaining the best teacher that you can possibly be, and the only person who can make that happen is you.

These days, teaching are somehow different from in the past. Why? Let's see how the trends in education are right now..

• There are a lot of differences among students than there used to be, or we may say it as an increased diversity. Diversity has made teaching is more fulfilling as a career, but also made more challenging in certain aspects.
• Increased instructional technology, as we may now, technology has created new ways for student to learn. For instance, students use computer to operate the internet and do research, writing, communicating and keeping records.
• Greater accountability in education, both public and educators themselves pay more attention than in the past to how to assess learning and good quality teaching.
• Now, teachers are able to assess their quality of their own work and to take steps to improve when necessary or let's just say increased professionalism of teachers.

There's a lot to learn about teaching, and much of it comes from educational psychology.


Chapter 2: The Learning Process

Learning is defined as relatively permanent changes in knowledge, skills, attitudes, or even behavior resulting from identifiable psychological or social experiences.  A key feature is determined: changes do not count as a learning if it's temporary.
In particular teachers' perspectives on learning often emphasize three ideas:

1. curriculum content and academic achievement
2. Sequencing and readiness
3. The importance of transferring learning to new or future situations.

In a small classroom, no other viewpoint of social interaction makes sense. Yet, in the wider place outside the school, learning often does happen incidentally without conscious interference or input from others. As  teachers, we sometimes see incidental learning in classroom as well, and often welcome it, but our responsibility for curriculum goals more often focuses our effort on what students can learn through conscious, deliberate effort. In a classroom, unlike in any other human settings, it is always necessary to ask whether classmates are helping or hindering individual's students' learning.

The difference between teaching and learning creates a secondary issues for teachers, that of educational readiness. Traditionally the concept referred to students' preparedness to cope with or profit from the activities and expectations of school. 

Here is a table which shows the reading readiness between students and teachers

Major theories and models on learning:

1. Behaviorism: is a perspective on learning that focuses on changes in individuals' observable behaviors- changes in what people say or do.
2. Respondent Conditioning (sometimes also called classical conditioning) begins with the involuntary responses to particular sights, sounds,or other sensations.
3. Operant Conditioning: focuses on how the effects of consequences on behaviors. The operant model of learning begins with the idea that certain consequences tend to make certain behaviors happen more frequently. 
4. Constructivism: Behaviorist models of learning may be helpful in understanding and influencing what students do, but teachers usually also want to know what students are thinking, and how to enrich what students are thinking. For this goal of teaching, some of the best help comes from constuctivism which is perspective on learning focused on how students actively create knowledge our of experiences.
5. Psychological Constructivism: The main idea of psychological constructivism is that a person learns by mentally organizing and reorganizing new information or experiences
6. Social Constructivism: some psychologist and educators have explicitly focused on the relationships and interactions between a learner and more knowledgeable and experienced individuals.