My Developmental Stages In LearningTheories

Introduction

         During my 1950-2002 teaching career, I had a great number of changes occurring in my learning life and in my teaching methods. When I began to look at my history with Teaching Methodology and Psychology I saw a set of four developmental stages. So I will be dealing with the first stage in this week’s blog.

Stage One – 1950 – 1955

Teaching Experiences

 Country School, Grades 1-8      Grades 5 and 6       Grades 7-8 Basketball Coach

I graduated with a B. A, from Northern Illinois State Teachers College (now Northern Illinois University - NIU) in the summer of 1950. I had a major in History and a minor in Psychology and I was looking for a high school teaching position. There were none to be found - I was fortunate to find a job in a public country school, grades 1-8. The following year I taught a 6th grade class. The following three years I taught a six grade class while coaching a junior high school basketball team. I realized that I like to work and learn with children below the high school level. 

Educational Teaching Methods

Traditional School        Progressive School

All of the classes I taught during the last four years were based on the Traditional School model. The children sat at individual desks lined up in straight rows. All of the children read the same Reader, studied the same lists of words weekly in the Spelling manual, studied the same arithmetic examples in their text book, had the same “home work,”  and all of the rest of the context, done without speaking or getting out of their desks without getting my permission. I came to believe that we could do better than that with our young people.

The Progressive School of John Dewey that I learned about in college was making headway in other school systems but not in the ones I taught in.

It must be noted here that my basketball teams and the players in those teams were coached in the same model as are teams presently and featured individualized learning and team (group) learning.

College Educational Psychologies

 Traditional School        Progressive Psychology    

Northern Illinois State Teachers College scholastically speaking was a very conservative school dealing mainly with new and experienced teachers - teachers are supposed to be conservative in our society. We learned how to teach our students the facts and information they needed in order to be competent in the society in which they live. We were trained to be teachers in the Traditional School. There was a lot of rote learning, memorization of facts such as the addition and multiplication facts.

We learned about John Dewey and his Progressive School and how it differed from the Traditional School but we were not being trained to teach in it. 

I had a major in History and a minor in Psychology. The courses I took in child psychology and adult psychology did not have a section entitled Learning Theory.  We learned about psychology such as Behaviorism and Pavlov’s dogs but that was learning Psychology as a subject alongside English, Biology, and Mathematics.