Western Views of Learning

 Western Views of Learning: 

Interview with Desiree

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For this provocation, I chatted with my friend Desiree who works full-time teaching English as a second language to adults. I mainly asked her a couple of questions over messenger that I was really interested in. The first question I had in mind was what were her top 3 pieces of advice for a future teacher. I asked this because I want to home-school my future children and would love her advice. I also asked what practices she thought worked the best for her class so I could get some examples to go along with her advice.

 

In response to my first concern, Desiree emphasized the importance of maintaining a close relationship with her students so she could understand them as individuals and how their method of learning may be different to others and students might need help identifying how to learn best for them. She also talked about how we need to have high expectations for students and I could relate to that helping me growing up. Desiree said it was also really important to partner those high expectations with love and support in order to prevent being a negative source of fear to the students. I also love how she talked about how the students model the teacher in terms of how they react to their own mistakes. She said that if she can focus on improving and not being too hard on herself when she fails then it will help her students to be successful later on as well. This might relate well to social cognitive theory as the ability for students to model not only the intellectual knowledge of the instructor but also her emotional reactions to her own failures may be seen as an environmental part of reciprocal determinism coined by Albert Bandura (International Bureau of Education, 2016; Santrock, 2020). In fact, Desiree understands that not only are her actions influencing her students as part of the environment but also that they may also have their own individual concerns going on. As mentioned before, she takes great effort to understand and monitor the internal state of each of her students.

Desiree said that the most important practice she found was adjusting to the students' state of mind and energy level to help them stay motivated, but also covering all the content at the same time. She said that it’s a balance but it is important. In Bandura’s sense (International Bureau of Education, 2016; Santrock, 2020), she may be manipulating the behaviour of the student with a fun activity in order to raise their interest, but at the same time she can't be doing this all the time if she wants to get through everything, so she learns to pick her moments.

 

My major takeaway from my talk with Desiree is how important it is to understand and care about the individual so that I might know how I can help their learning journey through changing behaviour through activities and also how I need to be a role model of good learning habits and a growth mindset for the ultimate success of my students.




References 

International Bureau of Education. (2016). Most influential theories of learning. International Bureau of Education. http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/geqaf/annexes/technical-notes/most-influential-theories-learning

Santrock, J. W. (2020). Essentials of life-span development (6th ed.). Mcgraw-Hill Education.











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