Online Class 03/03 - Lauren Owsley

As a future teacher, there are several aspects of the cognitive theory that I do agree with and really want to use to my advantage when I become a teacher. Since completing my teaching project, I really want to work on expanding long term memory and retrieval in my students. It makes sense to me that student will remember more if they are emotions associated with what they are learning or if you connect it with other material at school or in their lives. Making school more meaningful in general seems to be a solid way to get children to perform better, but also get more out of it. I also like the chart on page 212 about students that may have problems with cognition and some strategies to combat that because we will all be in diverse classrooms with diverse learners.

I think that it is also important to remember why students sometimes forget the information we teach them. This could be a great signal to us as educators that we haven't practiced or brought up the material enough over time (decay), we have given them too much information over a short time period (consolidation), or we have made it difficult to remember what facts go with what material even if they do remember parts of information (interference). There are a couple other reasons listed in the book as well, but the important thing I take away from this section would be a reflection of my teaching when the class as a whole doesn't remember material we have learned for a test or otherwise. Often times many teachers penalize the class when in actuality, as hard as it is to believe at the time, may be our fault.  

One thing that I am not sure will work or I will have to work harder to make sure it happens as a teacher, may be the concept of knowledge base. Since I have chosen to be in the urban multicultural cohort, I am not sure this group of children will come with a "standard" knowledge base that we all assume most children come with. I will have to recognize that and adapt my references and connections to education as an educator to match what they come with and what they already know socially/culturally, basically "meeting them where they are".