EME2040-Reflection#8

The area I scored the highest in my educational philosophy survey was Progressivism. In education, Progressivism is when you learn the best doing things in a concrete way, rather than abstract. Learning based on experiences and in a visual manner. I believe this is the way I learn the best. I learn best by seeing things visually and actually performing them. I seem to always grasp and remember the concept better this way. People that believe in this form of educational philosophy follow John Dewey’s model of learning. My second best score was the process of essentialism. This method is used to teach the basics of math, English, and science. It teaches a moral lesson and is usually with a much disciplined setting. It is said to be seen a lot in private or parochial schools, which I am a product of. It requires some competition among the students and the students are rated upon their scores on tests. For example, in my High School and K-8 school before that, we were always tested on regular things, and based on that they had different levels for each subject. They would have Honors English, Average English, and Skills English which would be the lowest. I believe this process can be effective because the student learns at the pace that is best for them. In a regular classroom they may be teaching something very quickly and there may be some students completely lost on the material and just lose complete interest. This process became popular by William Bagley. Finally, my last top score was Behaviorism/Objectivism. It derived from John Watson and it was the belief that the mind or conscious wasn’t associated with psychology, therefore studied objectively. Skinner rejected this idea and came up with operant conditioning which I do believe is effective and something that does happen. It is how are minds are made up. The way in which we behave or act has to do with how it affected our past which alters our behavior. The same way that everything we do is affected with experiences from our past. For example, we may be afraid of something now and have a phobia of it because may be when we were little we had a bad experience with it. As we get older, we realize this is why we have certain views and ideas on things. I believe this survey was accurate on what I believe is the most affective way of teaching.