Before planning the specifics of your learning activity and how to best achieve your overall goal, take into consideration the way people learn most effectively.

LEARNING AS A
TRANSFORMATIONAL PROCESS

Goal Is To Help Learners:

• Develop a deep foundation of knowledge and the skills and attitudes to apply and use it

• Successfully transfer learning from the "classroom" to the "real world"

• Develop the kind of thinking, problem-solving, and fluency used by "experts"

• Develop the skills and habits of a life-long learner

Teaching for Learning:

• Create an environment motivating to learners
  
  • Involve learners in setting their own learning goals
    
  • Target learning objectives to the proper level, designed to move learners to the next level of understanding
    
  • Explain how the knowledge/skill is/will be useful to the learner; demonstrate relevance
    
  • Provide opportunities for students to interact and share with each other
    
  • Structure activities to generate a "need to know" in learner

• Determine current level
  
• Correct misconceptions
  
• Build a bridge from what they know to the next level
  
• Explore mismatches between new knowledge and learners' cultural knowledge that would inhibit understanding and
  transfer

Existing
Knowledge

• Provide a conceptual framework for facts and ideas and help learners organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application
  
  • Help learners recognize meaningful patterns
    
  • Organize information around core concepts/principles/prototypes (rather than superficial coverage of isolated facts)
    
  • Chunk information by underlying function or strategy
    
  • Avoid sacrificing depth for breadth
    
  • "Conditionalize" the learning by specifying contexts in which its application is useful and appropriate
    
  • Use compare and contract and "What if…" learning strategies to help learners contextualize and generalize information

• Provide experiences that facilitate learning with understanding (versus rote memorization)
  
  • Actively involve learner
    
  • Provide hands-on experience
    
  • Provide time needed for significant learning to occur
    
  • Facilitate guided practice with feedback about the learners understanding, performance, and insight about when, where, and why to apply learning
    
  • Help learners choose, adapt, and invent tools for problem-solving
    
  • Develop learner's metacognitive skills--the ability to monitor their own current level and decide when it is not adequate