Instruction

Learner-Centred Planning and Instruction

Constructivism: Student actively constructs own knowledge.

Four Principles

1. Seems to support Cognition and Meta-cognition, by facilitating thinking and self awareness by making corrective steps to fill in the gaps.
2. Seems to support Motivation and Affect, because it taps into the students desires to empower them to dig into the material.
3. Seems to support Developmental & Social Needs, because the students actively work with the world around them and by interacting with others.
4. Seems to be supportive to  Individual Differences, each student has a different learning style, gender, class and culture which the student can use in their own way to support their learning.

Three Strategies

1. Problem based or Project based strategies: students work together to solve a problem or create a project. This is how students can make a real world connection, and produce a product which would be a solution to a real world problem.
2. Asking Essential Questions: these are questions that dig down to the heart of the matter, like essay questions that ask to make connections.
3. Discovery Learning: Research based which guides the students understanding through the material. Guided discovery which is like Vygotsky’s scaffolding.

Integrating the Curriculum

1. Authentic: curriculum is more like the real world; subjects are normally holistically integrated, which makes the knowledge more useful to the everyday situations.
2. School: Subjects are not holistic, subjects are all taught separately and do not make any connections to each other which does not make sense when applying it to the real world.

Teacher Centred Planning and Instruction

Traditionalism: teacher centred approach, where the teacher is the direct provider of the knowledge the student needs to receive. Teacher lectures.

Behavioural Objectives: Statements that communicate proposed changes in the students behaviour to reach desired levels of performance.

1. Student’s behaviour, what the student will be able to do.
2. Conditions under which the behaviour will take place (when, where, how).
3. Performance criteria (measureable) and the terms (degree of accuracy or precision or quality).

*must be observable and measureable.

By June 15, Johnny will be able to correctly state all the provinces and capital cities in Canada with 90% accuracy.

ACT-How

1. Actions- the verb
2. Conditions
3. Terms
4. How? How will you know, how will it be assessed?

Instructional Taxonomies: There are a number of them including Blooms taxonomy, Affective Domain (emotional engagement), and Psychomotor Domain.

My Opinion

Personally I think the method Teacher Centred Instruction is most helpful, as a student I like to know what it is I need to know, and I can assume that if the professor states something I would probably need to know it. But I also like to incorperate the student centred approach as well, I think that it is important to dig deeper and find out material what you find interesting and expand it in a way that you find useful. It is important to show that you are able to use the ideas the instructor has taught you in a way that you can look at a subject and state what is going on even if it isn’t the particular example shown. I really find this most useful in biology and other science programs because the idea are too complex to understand if you teach yourself but with they help of someone who has the knowledge and knowing it for yourself in the end it is easy to find similar examples, or larger examples but explain it in a more complex way.