Topic > Education: Beyond Academia and Into Society - 1675

Learning isn't just about giving kids a way to solve their problems or having them explain what they've learned in their own way, it starts with understanding how students learn. In reading Steven Turner, he stated, “Because student learning is the one measure that all teachers are expected to influence, before they can influence their students, teachers have a great deal of understanding of how students learn.” . (page 9). In my previous example of teaching the boy subtraction, I had a very fixed view of his learning and believed that the only way to tell if it affected his learning in subtraction was to see if he could use his own words to explain it. However, kids are still developing their language, so it's not fair to measure their learning ability or my influence on how they explain a new concept. Instead learning starts with identifying how your student learns best and for my tutor student maybe this wasn't even how he learns best, maybe he needs physical representations. During my internship this semester, a student came to me with his completed math worksheet and I pointed to the subtraction problem on it and said, "I like the hard work you put into this, I I was wondering how you got this answer?” and took me to the number line in his classroom. He went on to explain how he uses the number line to count backwards and see what number he gets to and this is his answer. A couple of weeks later, he was struggling with a difficult subtraction problem and asked me to help him. I wanted to explain it the way I understood it, with physical manipulations or using the concept of friend, but I realized that he had a way of understanding subtraction, so I tried to draw on that. We need to learn how our students understand concepts in order to make any kind of concept