Learning Theories

     During my 5th grade class room service-learning, I have seen the teacher most often use the Cognitivism learning theory.  During the hour that I am there helping, most often the class is working on math. Because this is a 5th grade class, they are working on harder math concepts that take more thought and problem solving skills. This month they are focusing on fractions, how to simplify, multiply and divide.

    In order to help the students best accomplish these harder math problems and truly understand how to apply the steps, the teacher most often breaks things down into smaller parts. By breaking things down into multiple steps and elaborating things that might be confusing, the students are better able to follow the process. I also really enjoyed some of his examples. The teacher is a soft ball coach, and he showed the students the steps involved in throwing a pitch. By breaking down something they can visually see, and integrating that with the steps in breaking down and simplifying the fraction, the students were able to see the importance of each step. I feel like the students really caught on and enjoyed the example. It also pulls into play the idea of multiple learning intelligence by showing students visual representation, allowing whole body interaction, and showing how its important to break down steps. The teacher also walked them through the steps on the white board, allowing visual learners to see and understand as well. In the end, multiple learning intelligence were used to be sure the information reached the students in a variety of ways.