Importance of the different ways of learning and different methods of teaching

During the second chapter of Newcomb's Methods of Teaching Agriculture, I learned about 16 principles of learning. A lot of those are applicable to every day life; success is a strong motivating force -- everyone wants to be successful and be good at something. People also like to know how and why something will be useful to them and why they should to take the time to get to learn it.

I was reminded of animal training with some of the later principles since it says that reinforcement must follow as soon as possible after the desired behavior so it is clearly connects with the behavior. This is the same for training horses and dogs. Since you cannot explain what behavior you liked and didn't like, you have to reward them as soon as they do something well so they will associate that behavior with something good. Same goes for punishment, if they do something wrong and you wait 20 min to say "bad dog" the animal will be confused and learning will not occur.

It was interesting to read that learning is most likely to be used if it is learned in a situation similar to the one it will be used in. This makes a lot of sense and may be why people can be really bad at math or theories since they don't apply them to the real world. This is why agricultural education is different from other subjects as it applies the information learned into real life situations.

While chapter two talks about how students learn, chapter 6 talks about teaching techniques that teachers could use. Examples being, planning lectures, four different types of discussion, demonstrations, field trips, role-play, and using a resource person. It talked a lot about how especially when using demonstrations, the students have to be given time to practice something to actually understand it. It is important that they get the time to do that or else that teaching technique will not be effective.

Lectures are also sometimes used to "fill" time which is not a good way to use it at all. Lectures should be organized well and have concrete planning to actually teach the students something.

http://www.learningsuccess.com/memory_principles_total_success.htm

Learning doesn't work how it is depicted in the picture, students cannot just sit in class while we attempt to shove knowledge into them. We have to use the different principals of learning and teaching to really make the students comprehend and be able to apply the information.