As future teachers, our goal should be essentially to help our students learn and for them to reach their potential as a student. We should always be searching for ways to give the students what they need as learners. I believe it’s important to teach in a way that is informed by all learning theories; however, I don’t think it’s all that important to classify and nit pick whether or not every learning theory is being applied. If classifying becomes the focus, I believe more attention will be given to the theories rather than the actual students. I'm willing to bet that there have past teachers that have used all the theories to inform their teaching, but students still walked out of his or her classroom learning nothing. I would first ask myself are my students actually learning the material? I believe this question directly relates back to the learning theories because these theories attempt to explain how humans learn. Not one of these learning theory can completely explain learning which is why there are numerous learning theories. My teaching will be affected by all of the theories. I will ask myself how are the different theories being incorporated throughout each of my lessons. At the end of the day, however, I want to be able to look back and conclude that my student have learned, quite frankly I believe this conclusion must be proven by using assessments. These assessments will also be informed by the different learning theories to ensure that the students understand every aspect of a particular topic.
One thing that we learned in class was that often times there are activities that can't be clearly traced back to one of the theories. For example when all the theories are used at one time it may be hard to distinguish what theory the ideas are coming from. This is probably when learning and teaching are at their finest because the brain is being forced to stretch and reconstruct. Teaching isn’t in a vacuum, as teachers we must use theories but not let the theories use us.
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