Questions about LT's

I think the easiest way to know if the learning theories in the classroom are prevalent (notice I don't say how I know that I'm using the theories) is by analyzing what the students' ZPD's are. I would first ask myself what the average student has knowledge of the subject already and try to expand that. For example, if I am a teaching 9th grade Spanish or ESL/ELL class, and the students already know how to speak in the present tense, I would try to teach them to speak in the present progressive tense. However not everyone, especially in foreign language class, may have the same abilities or understanding of the material as others. I would have to explain the how the tenses work in different ways so they can understand it. I would think about what their schemas are and have to find a way to fix it (CLT).

In regards to Developmental Learning Theory, I would need to ask myself what would be concrete for them to understand and how concrete does it need to be. Then if the students can't understand it that way, how can I make it more concrete? I would also have to ask myself when is the right time to go abstract. 

For Social LT, I would need to ask myself how I word what I say. For example, if I am teaching ELL, I would have to speak in slow, simple English, but if I'm teaching Spanish I would have to speak Spanish slowly and simply as well. I would also need to ask myself who the more knowledgeable peers are and to what affect would their presence in the classroom be.

Social Learning Theory

The Social Learning Theory is so essential to teaching because it's comprised of doing the one thing humans do best: socializing! If humans didn't socialize, they could never pass what knowledge or ideas they have to one another, and without that, I don't know how we'd survive as a species.

I also think that the Social Learning Theory is important because it brings what is being taught down to earth. To young people, teachers are considered authority, a label to which feelings of contempt and indifference can be produced. Sometimes the teacher can get so caught up giving the lecture that he or she forget to think about how the students are absorbing the material. In high school, my teachers always would look around the room after a lecture and say,"Do we understand everything?" Then of course we would all murmur "yes" and/or absent-mindedly nod our heads. This would be how our teachers would "know" that we "understood" everything. They never followed through with assessing how well we understood the material or what we did or didn't understand or who really understood or didn't understand what. This is something that the students should have gotten the chance to assess amongst themselves. What would students talk about after the class was over? The lecture that happened that day!
Who do most students turn to at first when they can't answer a math problem? Most likely it will be a friend or someone sitting next to them. When I was in my high school Spanish class, my classmates and I had to read texts in Spanish. Immediately we all split up into groups of friends working to translate what we read. If we hadn't done this, none of us would've never been able to finish it.

So basically what I'm trying to say is that it's important that teachers allow the students to at least have some time to make contact with the people around them. They can talk about what they learned or the teacher could ask them to work together to solve a problem or anything like that. Teachers often get too tied down with maintaining rigid "discipline."

However I do see some problems with SLT as well. The students could go off subject and just start talking about everything but the subject. In some cases having social interactions may not even make sense in some situations. However overall it can be useful in the end. I'm still trying to understand how a teacher would use DLT and SLT together. Perhaps there is no one easy answer for that question.

DLT/ Mr. Bouris

From what I've learned so far, Developmental Learning theory is the most essential part of teaching something. No matter who your students are, you must have a plan to bring the students from the concrete to abstract.

In my sophomore year of high school, I had a geometry teacher named Mr. Bouris. For the most part, he was a very laid back guy and had a pretty good sense of humor. He occasionally liked to poke fun at individual students and would sometimes spray water out of the bottle that he used to clean his overhead projector with. He definitely was fun to be around and usually was pretty approachable. However he had no idea how to teach geometry.

When he did lessons, he would never put any actual effort into teaching us. He would just pull out the overhead projector and draw out the examples in the book. Instead of inviting students up to the board to maybe show a few problems and see if they could do it themselves or make concrete models that would make it all seem sensible, he would then just assume that we understood it all. Although some students understood everything after those few examples, most of us would be absolutely perplexed as to what was going on. Then he would give us a practice worksheet that we would turn in the next day. Usually I would just stare at the sheet and then go up to ask him for help. He would attempt to explain it again with the exact same example from the book, which would make me even more confused. When I would ask him if I come in later, he would tell me that the only time he could work with me was during the class.

Looking back, I wonder how on earth I passed that class. Although I admittedly have never been the best with math, he seemed to just make things worse. Throughout the majority of the class, I had a pretty good feeling he did not want to be there. He actually told us one day that he preferred teaching Algebra 2 over Geometry any day. Ever since I've had him as my teacher, I have made a solemn vow to myself that I will never teach like him.