How People Learn

Today I was in the first grade classroom for the first time and I absolutely loved it. The teacher is fabulous and I am so excited to learn from her. The students are so cute and welcoming, the second I walked into the room I was greeted with a handful of hugs.

While I was observing and helping the teacher, I noticed she seemed to use the behaviorism theory the most. One way she uses this theory is through a classroom store. Throughout each day the students have the opportunity to earn class money so they can buy things later on in the week from the classroom store. This strategy seemed to work really well for her class, as soon as the students saw another student earning money for being on task they all seemed to get on task so they too could be rewarded. Another strategy she uses is by having the desks arranged into three groups, each group has a team name (they they chose) and they have the opportunity to earn tally marks for their team, for example, the class was told to clean up from an activity they had just finished and were told to sit quietly in their desks when finished, the table who was finished and quiet first got a tally mark. At the end of the day when it was time to go home the team with the most tally marks got to line up first at the door. Another strategy I noticed was when a child was misbehaving they were told to stand by the back door and wait for the teacher to come back and talk with them about their behavior. All of these strategies seemed to work really well for her classroom and for her students and although Behaviorism was the most common theory I saw, I noticed all three theories being used at different times in her classroom while I was there.

While I was at the school I also had the opportunity to sit in on an IEP meeting where I saw a team of teachers and parents come together to address the specific learning needs of their child/student and discuss a plan to move forward. I loved how the whole purpose and goal of this meeting was to find the best ways to help this child succeed and it was great to see how supportive both the teachers and the parents were of each other. This is definitely one way the teacher addresses the developmental levels and the individual learning preferences of her students. She also has times in the classroom where the students split up into different groups (depending on their level of learning) to learn a certain subject and work on an assignment together.

It was a great day today in her classroom.