Day 10

Understanding Our Learners

It’s very important to know our learners before attempting to design any teaching environment.

Learners today are different than the past, and one type of learning environment may not engage all learners or engage them to the capacity. Technology today has evolved and with it todays learners.  Learners of today are more engaged and more demanding they have access to media and the internet and the all tools that come with it. One teaching approach cannot offer the students the same level of engagement, and satisfy their demanding nature unless it’s designed to complement their demanding and changing nature with the tools, and designs that motivates them.  

Distributed learning environments that planned and designed carefully can offer the students the level of engagement that can satisfy their demanding nature and keep them motivated and satisfied.  But Before we can design and environment we need to know our students we need to know their “grade level” of learning and skills, their age, ethnicity, ways of living and culture, their history and background. We need to search around us within the schools and beyond to find more about them, we need to frequently observe the students, test them, look at their work and school records and ask other teachers to gather more information about them. We need to go beyond that and develop a relation with the parents, elders and the community to understand their backgrounds, culture and then their motivations and learning styles.  Once we build adequate information about our students then we could choose the best way of instructional methods, environment and begin on building the learning environment that focus on acquire the student’s motivation by activities and designs created for that reason.

Student’s motivation is the key for student’s engagement and for effective learning. Our job as educators is to insure that our students are interested challenged and motivated.