Teaching Principles: Module 4

• Materials for the Principles of Teaching module cover seven topics with corresponding module codes.
• The fourth module delves specifically into the principles of teaching and learning.
• The module aims to exemplify teaching principles within the Philippine context.
• It seeks understand learning principles in the context of a the COVID-19 pandemic.
• It aims to analyze learning approaches for effective learning.
• Assessment includes essays, quizzes, and online activities for asynchronous learning.

The Five Areas of Teaching Principles

• Teaching principles comprise five areas, including respect for the individual.
• Also focuses on viewing democracy as a way of life, and providing conditions for sound personality development.
• Principles include improving group living in classrooms and enhancing the classroom environment.
• New teaching approaches emphasize initiative, responsibility, and positive experiences.
• Contemporary trends prioritize self-confidence, intellectual, and emotional integrity.
• Democratic education involves respect for individual potentials and contribution to the group.
• Encourages participation in experiences to foster growth and the right to choose based on capacity.
• School life significantly impacts a learner's mental health and personality.

Principles of Learning

• Learning involves modifying behavior through experience.
• It's an active process to improve and coordinate responses, not just passive observation.
• Learning enriches experience through interaction with the environment.
• Learning is essential in schools, modifying reactions through experience or practice.
• Learning makes initially challenging concepts easier with repetition.
• Learning modifies behavior more or less permanently, and results from experience, excluding changes due to injury or sensory adaptation.
• Motivation, goals, readiness, responses, reinforcement, and generalization are characterizing the learning process.
• Classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning, social learning and cognitive learning are learning processes.

Nature of Learning

• Approaches to studying learning include experimental (Thorndike, Hull, Skinner) and clinical approaches.
• Learning leads to new behavior or strengthening of old behavior to change future behavior.
• Learning expands adaptive behavior and includes adjustments, skill acquisition, and emotional control.
• Motives drive the process, springing from a goal with aspects vital for effective learning.
• Satisfaction of motives leads to repetition, dissatisfaction leads to abandonment.
• Learning can involve symbols and abstract concepts.
• Learners manipulate and find solutions, relying on past experiences and imagination.
• Learning curves in laboratory settings may be crude initially due to distractions or fluctuating motivation.
• Effective learning involves psychological factors, motivation, learning ability, physical bases, receptors, and the nervous system.

Theories of Learning

• The "behaviorist theory" views an individual as a collection of responses to stimuli, accounted for through mechanisms like classical or operant conditioning.
• Higher mental functions hold very little significance as learning primarily happens through trial, error and reward. Conditioning, punishments, and rewards are able to control an individual's motives.
• Another set of theories, the "organismic theories" (Gestalt and field theories), emphasize cognitive processes: insight, intelligence, and organization. Key characteristics of human response including present perception of the environment.
• Humas are intelligent and capable of seeing and creating relationships.
• Gagne's Conditions of Learning links cognitive processes with learning events for different skills.
• The information processing theory is one that supports cognitive perspective that sees specific ways to which items are learned.
• The first concept states there are a number of human minds that are inherently endowed with reasoning, remembering and imagining, which can grow with exercise.
• The second concept assumes man is a system of dynamic forces balancing the physical world through sense organs.
• The essence of this theory is that the mind contains all attributes and education brings them forth through knowledge acquisition. Practice and drill are important but motivation is not.

Theoretical Frameworks

• S-R Bond Theory: Conditioning responses link to stimuli, a result of biological processes.
• Behaviorism: Learning builds conditioned reflexes and denies innate tendencies meaning that an individual is a matter of conditioning.
• Gestalt Theory: Instinct leads to meaningful patterns in modification of behavior.
• Functionalism: Behavior is adaptive, helping individuals maintain equilibrium.
• Pavlov suggests that learning occurs when a neutral stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

B.F. Skinner Operant Conditioning Theory

• Individual learns desired responses due to reward and avoids undesired responses due to punishments.
• Operant conditioning uses pleasant or unpleasant consequences to control behavior.
• Reinforcers strengthen behavior and this is divided into primary (basic needs), secondary (associated with primary), positive (strengthens), negative (releases from unpleasant conditions), intrinsic (inherent activity), and extrinsic (motivates behavior through prizes and rewards).
• Punishment weakens behavior, leading to aversion.
• Shaping teaches new behavior and skills to help individuals through rewarding behaviors.
• Extinction eliminates behaviors with reinforcement.
• Cue signals what behavior elicits reinforcement or punishment.
• Discrimination means to act in response to a stimuli.
• Generalization is a way to carry learned behaviors in one condition to other conditions and situations".

Principles of Learning in Operant Conditioning

• Principle of Consequence: Behavior varies according to pleasant or unpleasant consequences.
• Principle of Reinforcement: Any action increases response probability.
• Premack Principle/ "Grandma's Rule": Desired activities increase by linking to more desired activities.
• Principle of Extinction: Behavior dims when reinforcement withdrawn.
• Theories applied to teaching: Adequate practice, positive behaviors, varied reinforcers, consistent reinforcement, and assistance with generalization are important in teaching".
• Careful, systematic praise and appropriate reinforcers/punishment is needed along with care reinforcing undesirable behaviors and the use of negative reinforcements in place of punishments".
• Learners' performance shall not be compared.
• Punishments need to be applied consistently.
• Emphasis is put on the learner's behavior and not on who they are as a person

Social Learning Theory

• Learning: occurs when observation and imitation takes place through observation and imitation. Concepts are observational, vicarious, and self-regulated learning.
• Characteristics includes observational learning with four phases: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
• Vicarious learning comes from consequences of others' behavior".
• It features self-regulation, assessing behavior against standards to reward/punish.
• Models are categorized as real-life (teachers, parents), symbolic (books), representational (films).
• Modeling: Includes attention, retention, motor reproduction, self-management.
• Components of successful modelling requires the student to be oriented in a way that they know why they are demonstrating that model.
• The pupils/students should observe and think about what is being done. Provide a way to help students remember the behavior".
• Pupils/students must be physically prepared to perform the behavior that is being shown as a model. Learners need direction and guidance to gain contro of how they are learning.

Laws of Learning

• Learning happens when learners are ready; readiness leads to effective, satisfying learning.
• Hooking the learners and letting them discover the importance of the subject motivates the students to meet set standards".
• Course construction gives an easier approach to understanding and learning what it is that the course is covering".
• Exercise: The more a person practices on something, the better their knowledge improves".
• Disappearance: The less you use the knowledge we obtain, the more likely we are to forget is "Use It Or Lose It"
• Applying, repeating, or connecting the information to existing knowledge gives you a higher chance to obtain the knowledge".
• Review material multiple times: adding practice problems, mini-quizzes, and summaries". A continuous "recall" increases the learners' retention level

Laws of Effect and Primacy

• Law of Effect: Learning strengthens with satisfying feelings, weakens with unpleasant ones/ satisfaction.
• Students are more likely to learn when they are satisfied or rewarded for their actions.
• Create Q&A's, discussion forums: allowing the learners to interact with each other by using social tools to inspire empathy and creativity". The students must be receiving constant feedbacks to give direction and motivation to their courses.
• Law of Primacy: Once a person learns something, it can be difficult for them to change on how there were first introduce to that concept
• Instructional Designers: Present content in a logical order and must prepare and follow a course curriculum to ensure efficient deliver of the first subject".
• The more excitement your course creates and a better sense of how to remember certain concepts, will allow students to better remember.

Laws of Recency and Intensity

• Law of Recency includes chapter unit reviews and the bulding and referencing previous knowledge". Includes old and new information to create an easier understanding".
• Law of Intensity refers to strong emotions in the lesson making the lesson more easily remembered".
• Connect course to real life and make scenarios that reflect what will be the reality".