Psych 301 Teaching Reflection

Louisa McSweeney
Reflection on Teaching

While Michelle and I were planning on teaching the parts of Social Constructivism that we were in charge of, we decided to use the different theories of learning on our students. We not only wanted to teach them what the strategies were and how you could use them but also wanted them to put them into practice. I feel that we were successful in our approach because I think that the students were able to really understand the definitions based on the activities we had them do.
We used collaboration, cooperation/cooperative learning, and jigsaw in the first activity. In our activity we had the students discuss the differences between collaboration, cooperation, and cooperative learning while actually participating in these theories of learning. By doing this it was much easier to explain the differences between the three by referring back to their activity.
We were also able to bring in different teaching strategies that we learned in other lessons such as concept mapping (where we showed a way to remember the difference between collaboration, cooperation and group work). Along with the previous we used distributed practice (they practiced the principles multiple times throughout the lesson), and positive reinforcement (the treats).
It was great to be able to bring in different principles and strategies from others lesson to strengthen and improve the teaching of our own lesson. I can definitely see how a combination of the differing strategies can be used within one lesson plan.