Theory Readings

Whoa! That was a lot to digest, but I found it very useful in terms of updating my knowledge about the theories that are out there. I appreciated the readings from Monday a lot more (Chapters 2 and 3) once I began reading 5,6,7. I found it useful to be reminded of all of those theories (Unfoldment, Structuralism, Behaviorism, etc.) from Undergrad "Child Psychology" classes. I was actually surprised at how much I remembered, particularly about Pavlov( I remembered the dogs) and Skinner. Several of the things I read verified things I am already doing in my classroom Classical Conditioning(teaching things in a sequential order from easiest to more difficult) and Connectivism (positive reinforcement) and I began to think back to a lot of the professional development I have taken part in and it is evident that a lot of what teachers are taught has its roots in theoretical approaches.



Once I had the general consensus of theories on how people learn, I was excited to see what the theories of literacy development, in particular, had in store. Piaget is a name I quickly recognized. I think it's amazing that he believed, "children learn through direct experiences and social interactions with peers. Play and activity, according to Piaget, were equated with intellectual growth." His research was done decades ago, yet his rationale still hold true today and it is the basis for such a push on pre-school settings for young children. His theory of cognitive development has also been useful in helping teachers and administrators determine "age-appropriate" activities and in turn create curricula and lesson plans accordingly. As a 4th grade teacher, I rarely get to see children explicitly in any of the stages from the "stage model" or in their "emergent literacy" phase, as those are both seen in primary grades, but I do see their effects. I believe most strongly in the Theory of Literacy Development and the Family Literacy Theory. It is important for teachers to be good role models (practice shared reading, use big books, read while the kids are reading) but it is SO important for parents to be models of good literacy for their children from a very young age. In college, I worked at a day-care center and it was obvious what families read together and talked to each other and what families did not. Parents are not only needed to model fluency, but they should also model the practice of reading so that it becomes a habit to the child. I liked the idea from this chapter of giving a family literacy survey so that, as a teacher, I can see where this child is coming from. I have always given my children a reading interest survey, but I am interested to see what the correlation between parents' and children's attitude towards reading.



In chapter 6, I thought that most of these theories were very similar. In short, there were two main points: 1. Reading is a social activity. 2. Children learn from social interactions with others. This includes the Social Learning Theory's idea of learning by being an observer. I think there are so many things that we do within the classroom to provide social learning experiences. The example in the book of literature circles is a really great way to get children talking and sharing experiences with one another in terms of their connections to the reading, background knowledge they bring, inferences they can make, etc. The theory which I think is in the spotlight most right now as "best practice" is Vygotsky's Social Constructivism. His idea of reaching a child in his or her "zone of proximal development" has sparked the idea of differentiated instruction. As a beginning teacher, I think this was one of the hardest things to do; teach one topic and one lesson, but reach all different kinds of learners. I learned by trial and error the best way to do this. Scaffolding has now become part of my every day routine.


The last chapter put is so eloquently that learning is our way of making sense of the world around us. It was interesting to see that there were several different ways to process information. The Atkinson and Shiffrin Model was a great visual representation and really helped me see what happens to new information when we learn it. The Automatic Information Processing Model is one that I think teachers in a lot of different grades see often. I really related to the Teacher Anecdote in this section. I see the same thing in my fourth grade class. When students have trouble decoding, it negatively affects their comprehension. Sometimes students focus so much on the skill of decoding that they are completely unable to recall or understand what they have just read. Another problem that I have seen stem from this is that once decoding becomes automatic, even when students reach a word they can decode, but don't understand, they rarely take steps to find out what it means. While teaching a reading strategy "Monitoring for Meaning" I had some students who were not using context clues as much as they should. Even if they could decode the words, they didn't understand what they meant. So, I gave them a short passage on something to do with car mechanics. The vocabulary was completely unfamiliar to them (and me too, at first). I challenged them to use their strategies (context clues, reread, read-on, infer, use background knowledge, etc.) to try to figure out what the text meant. I'm interested to see what the more current research says about information/cognitive process learning in the next two chapters.