Foundations of Teaching and Learning

Purpose:  

This course is created by a teacher for anyone who is interested in bettering their understanding of how we learn.  My purpose for creating this course is twofold, first for teachers and second for parents and students.

First, for teachers. This is my attempt at providing a useful and relevant professional development opportunity for teachers with topics that are at the foundation of learning.   Many of these topics and ideas are not new but do form a foundational aspect of how we learn, but they don’t receive much if any time in our professional development experience.  In this course, I will present concepts that I have directly gleaned from the research on learning, but have also been shown to work in the classroom.  On top of that, I have personally implemented these concepts in my teaching, following the research and recommendations, and found they offered great benefits to both my teaching and the student’s learning.  To be clear though, these topics don’t work because of my anecdotal experience, but because they are based on what we know about how learning works in the brain, and they have been tested and still continue to be tested in rigorous ways both inside and outside the classroom. 

My second purpose is to provide a place for parents and students to come and find useful information to help guide their understanding of learning.  Learning isn’t confined to schools and classrooms, so the information about learning should not be confined to school either.  Too often though, that is the case. Beyond that, schools (in general) don’t usually do a good job of working with parents and students to explain what learning is and how it works.    I want to provide a place where some simple understandings and guiding principles can help anyone understand more about learning.