Task One Assignment
Student Name: - John Fitzpatrick
Review what your role, responsibilities and boundaries as a teacher would be. How do your actions, teaching methods and activities influence your students in terms of the teaching /training cycle and other theories of learning?
Education is as fundamental to us as life itself. From birth onwards we are learning: from our parents, our siblings, our peers, our teachers, media and, of course, our mistakes. We ourselves construct our own learning styles through experiences we deal with everyday. Within those experiences we learn about our responsibilities and roles in life and discover what boundaries we should, or should not, cross. The same can be said for education.
Being a union tutor means that almost all tutoring will be adult based, which generally means the students will be more receptive to the information being taught, as most are there either to advance in their jobs or for personal achievement. As keen as many of these students are, we must not forget that for many this will be their first venture into education since leaving school, and additionally, be they new to education or old hands, all students learn at different speeds and react to teaching in different ways. For effective teaching to take place, and to ensure all students have an equal chance of learning, a good teaching method will need to be adopted, and to help in this we need to understand the way people learn. As explained on the Learning and Teaching website (Atherton 2005), Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (1984) gives us an idea into the progression by which students understand and process their experiences and consequently modify their behaviour. Kolb’s cycle contains four stages - concrete experience (feeling), reflective observation (watching), abstract conceptualisation (thinking) and active experimentation (doing) – that are considered the basic steps to learning, and are repeated on and on as the student’s knowledge...