EDU 500: Learning Theory: Developing Lifelong Learners

Overview

The students in this course will investigate learner-centered educational theory and practices. Students will explore cognition, memory, motivation, diversity, and social learning and the frameworks of effective schooling. The course will focus on what it takes for educators to meet the individual needs of students in order to enhance academic achievement. Students will acquire strategies to be responsive to the needs and experiences that children bring to the classroom, including those based on culture, community, ethnicity, economics, linguistics, and innate learning abilities.

This course will also explore the ways in which schools provide professional development and technical assistance to faculty and staff to ensure that everyone can match the intellectual, emotional, and social level of each student to the curricula being explored, and to choose alternative teaching strategies and materials to achieve different curricular purposes.

This course will use a range of instructional techniques to provide students with multiple opportunities to reflect, plan, discuss and practice new skills and strategies. The sections entitled “reflections on being a student” throughout this first class reinforce topics discussed during your JIU orientation and aid you in both understanding your own patterns of learning and in establishing winning behaviors.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Discuss theoretical and scientific understanding about teaching and learning.
• Develop learning strategies in line with these ideas.
• Demonstrate responsiveness to the needs and experiences students bring to the classroom, including those based on culture, community, ethnicity, economics, linguistics, and innate learning abilities.
• Employ a wide range of teaching techniques to match the intellectual, emotional, and social level of each student, and choose alternative teaching strategies and materials to achieve different curricular purposes.
• Demonstrate an understanding of the collection of data on individual student achievement in order to be accountable for each student's learning.
• Demonstrate understanding of the techniques through which individualized assessment and instruction are presented to teachers and advocated within school buildings in order to establish a school-wide culture of learning.
• Create instructional strategies to address a variety of learning stages and development in the child, specific to the age group you will be teaching.

Required Texts
EDU 500 texts are available from the JIU/MBS bookstore