Final

What?... Cognitivism is the theory that I think children learn best. It is the particular way of mentally responding to or thinking about information or an event. It is the way that the learner mentally interprets or remembers what they see, hear, and study. Self talk is a major part of this theory, because the learner has to be able to talk themselves through a certain task. I believe that self talk helps the information to encode, thus making it better to store in you memory. This is evident in my own life because I do a lot of self talk, specially when I am doing something for the first time. A good example of that is when I started to learn how to wake board. When I started getting brave enough to go over the wake, I had to hear my husbands mental process of getting over the wake. When I was getting pulled behind the boat, I was able to use that same self talk to get me through that situation. In the classroom, students need to encode information and store it in their memory as schema. The schema makes it possible that there is a continual learning happening in the brain. Even though I scored highest on the cognitive, I was pretty close with the behaviorism too, which I think plays a role in learning as well. If there is a bad attitude towards learning, it is not going to happen.

So What? ... One of the biggest processes I will use in the classroom is self talk. I want the students to hear me verbally express what I am going through in my mind to solve even a simple math problem. I want my students to verbally say out loud the process that they go through to get to a certain mile stone in a problem. The toughest problems I feel in math are the story problems; I want students to self talk themselves through the problem to help them get to the end result. I wish I had a teacher that did that for me in elementary school because I was not good at story problems because I didn't have self talk. I think that once you self talk yourself through a problem, you make the problem your own. Once you are the "owner" of your problem it is easier for you to encode the information and store in your memory. Also, with self talk I think comes self regulation. That is dipping into the behavior part of psychology, however, I do feel that it is important for students to learn self regulation. In the classroom I want students to be engaged in activities and be able to know how to regulate how they will do a certain project. I will facilitate this by giving the students tasks that they will need scaffolding with and help them make a timeline to get the job done. I think that learning self talk and self regulation are one of the best things a student could learn. Not only as a student these skills are essential but also for life. Students will feel success long after the classroom setting is not a constant for them and they are in the workforce.

Now What?... Now, as I am learning how to implement my goals for the classroom with self talk and self regulation, I need to practice them more to become a master of those skills. I first need to be able to recognize good situations where I am able to use self talk efficiently. Second, I need to find different ways to present self talk, because one size does not fit all in education. Third, I need to come up with a measurable way to see if my plan of implementing self talk is effective in the classroom. Finally, I need to constantly reflect on how I am introducing, practicing, and implementing self talk in the classroom and change anything that isn't effective.
I would like to know more about the brain. I wish that we could have a class on how the brain develops not only through elementary years but after as well. I think that it is so interesting that we are such intricate people. I think that our brain is what sets us apart from other animals on our planet. You don't see a tiger that has just eaten it's prey think to it's self "Now, how could I have executed that better?" That is our brain that makes us reflect and be better intricate human beings. I am fascinated by the development of the brain, I wish that we could have talked about the brain more when we looked in different texts that were brought in.
I need to learn more about behavioral psychology, I understand the experiments that we studied, however, I wish I knew more about actually implementing them in the classroom effectively. I want to know what works and what doesn't work. I know that I will find that out on my own as I am in a classroom. I really think that behavior is a major concern and sometimes an issue in the classroom, I wish I was more of an expert.