Meaningful learning

 After reading Chapter 1, I strongly agreed with what was written about the characteristics of meaningful learning.  The text explains that "tasks that require international, active, constructive, cooperative, and authentic learning processes will result in more meaningful learning." Throughout many of the reflections that I have been asked to write throughout my time at Ryerson, this idea has always been a strong theme throughout all of them. I find that I do my best at tasks that I am truly interested in. This mirrors what the text says about intentional learning. Its needs to be goal-directed, so that children want to learn. The learning material needs to be able to relate in some way to the children. This is what the text refers to as Authentic. I personally found that it was much easier to solve a math problem about a dog walker who has 5 dogs, and then 2 ran away, then figure out what 5-2=?.  Active learning is very important as I believe it can help children retain the knowledge that they are learning much more effectively. By actually doing something, you are able to learn for yourself and not learn abstractly through books or movies. Through my experiences and documentation I have also witnessed the essential role that constructive learning has. I believe that a great way for children to engage in this kind of learning is for them to keep a journal and write about the activities that they have done and what they learned from them. It is also important for children to be actively engaged in describing photos that have been taken of them. They then help in creating a memorable reflection and at the same time have the change to extend their learning by reflecting on the actual photograph.  Lastly I just wanted to point out something I found very interesting about collaboration. From my experience, many of my teachers stressed the importance of individual work, when in reality it is cooperation skills that can help people collaborate with each other to gain what they need without stressing solely on their own. We naturally talk with people, we naturally try and solve problems together (2 brains are better than 1) but yet children are given the tasks of working on their own. I believe that individual assignments are good practice for those times when you’re isolated at home without contact with anyone else, but for all those other times collaboration is the way to go!