Social Cognitivism

I modeled how to cut out a paper snowflake.

Attention: I told her “Today I’m going to teach you how to cut out one of those cool paper snowflakes. First I’ll show you how to fold the paper, then I’ll show you how to cut it out.” This helped to introduce curiosity about what it would look like at the end, and as I was showing her, I would direct her attention to new things I was doing by saying “Okay, look and I’ll show you how to fold the paper. First fold from here to here . . .” and so on.

Retention: I gave her a visual image to represent what I wanted her to do—I showed her how to fold and then cut the paper, and I had her do it with me, one step at a time.

Production: I had her cut out a second snowflake with me doing it at the same time again, giving her pointers to help her do it better. Then I had her do it again on her own while I watched her and gave her pointers.

Motivation and Reinforcement: The reason I gave her for doing this was that every kid likes to cut out paper snowflakes, so as a teacher or a mom, she will want to know how to do this to help her kids when they want to do it. To reinforce her, as she did each step with me, I would say “That’s good!” and then when the snowflake was done, we opened it up and it was beautiful, so it made her want to make another one and see how different it would look.

Using Information Processing

This is how I will use the Information Processing model to teach mitosis to my students.

First, I will get their attention by saying “Today we will be learning about how cells divide! This will be on the unit test” and then show a short animated video on mitosis.

Then I will introduce them to the stages of mitosis, and have them rehearse it several different ways:

1.     I will talk about the key points of mitosis

2.     Then I’ll use the smart board to draw the stages of mitosis and have the students do the same in their notes with colored markers

3.     Using the elmo, I’ll demonstrate to the students how to demonstrate mitosis using pieces of yarn as chromatids

4.     The students will then explain the process of mitosis to each other using the yarn

5.     We’ll review the stages of mitosis one more time.

6.     Then I’ll have them take home a blank flip book and fill draw the stages of mitosis in it, cut it out and put it together.

Practicing it by drawing it, modeling it with yarn, explaining it to each other while modeling, and filling out the flip book will also help them to encode the process more effectively.

Behaviorism Blog

I could shape my students’ behavior in teaching them how to use the scientific method to do lab work. The general steps are make observations, ask a question, form a hypothesis, design an experiment to test the hypothesis, conduct experiment and record the data, draw conclusions, and summarize the results of the experiment.

1.      First, I would teach them how to make observations. I would put the students in groups of three and have them look at a living organism. They would make a list of observations that they made about their organism and share with the class. Then we would talk about the differences between inferences (assumptions) and observations (something they actually see). Then I would have them rewrite their inferences as observations.

2.     After that, we would use a common experiment and I would walk them through each of the remaining steps of the scientific process, checking with students on each step to make sure they are understanding and doing it correctly, offering feedback if they are not doing it correctly, and positive reinforcement for the progress they make on each step. The reinforcement I use would most likely just be words of praise.