Pedagogical Theories and Practices helps in Encouraging Teaching that Builds on Students Prior Learning

Pedagogical Theories and Practices helps in Encouraging Teaching that Builds on Students Prior Learning

Pedagogical theories and practices recognize the cultural backgrounds of students. This helps in building bridges from knowledge and discourses often neglected in school settings to the learning of conventional academic knowledge and Discourse. Much of this work is derived from cognitive and sociocognitive approaches that seek to activate the student’s prior knowledge and link their existing knowledge to the concepts targeted. Pedagogical theories provide teachers rich knowledge and cultural practices their students might contribute in school28. Teachers are able to build between the mainstream academic knowledge and discourse, and the knowledge and discourse that students bring to classroom once they learn about the different forms of prior knowledge or the different discursive practices their students might bring in the classroom.29

Pedagogical Theories and Practices foster Teaching that is Culturally Responsive

Theories and practices of pedagogy encourage teachers to involve all learners in the construction of knowledge. According to these theories and practices, teachers are required to be culturally responsive. Culturally responsive teachers create a learning environment in which all learners are encouraged to make sense of new ideas30. This means that students are encouraged to construct knowledge that helps them better understand the world; rather than just memorize information that is pre-digested. Teachers, who assist their students in knowledge construction, involve them actively in learning tasks that promote the advancement of thought processes, including skills of hypothesizing, predicting, comparing, evaluating, integrating, and synthesizing31.

Pedagogy encourages teachers to give students an active role in learning by involving them in inquiry projects that have personal meaning to them. For instance, Rosebery and colleagues provided a good example of this practice; as applied in a science class for Haitian students in Massachusetts32. The majority of the students in this class believed that water from the school’s third floor fountains was better testing than the water from first floor fountains. The students were allowed to design and perform a blind taste experiment of water taken from several foundations to test their belief about superiority of third flour water. They were surprised to discover that two thirds of them preferred the first floor water. They expanded the experiment to include learners from other junior high school classes. The students were again surprised to discover that 88% of the sampled students preferred third floor water33. They analyzed the school’s water to try and make sense of their findings, where they discovered that first floor water was 20 degrees colder than that of any other floor34. They deduced that water becomes warmer as it moves up the pipe to the third floor and concluded that temperature was the likely factor influencing the respondents’ water preferences35.

The involvement of the students in performing the experiment actively engaged them in learning. When these students were carrying out the tests, they asked questions, designed ways of testing their hypothesis, gathered and analyzed data, and generated explanations. Therefore, the teacher provided the students a strong motive to learn embedding learning in a meaningful activity on a topic of interest to learners. Theories and practices of pedagogy encourage students to work collaboratively in small groups of mixed ability in a manner that improves their active learning. These students are able to share the cognitive demands built into the overall task when they work in groups to solve a problem or perform a project36. Brown and Palincsar, the benefit of small group task is maximized when each student adopts a different role37… Some of the roles identified include the doer who designs plans of action or offers solutions to the problem posed, the critic who questions the ideas generated by the group, the instructor who reviews for all group members the ideas discussed, the record keeper who keeps track of the group’s work, and the conciliator who settles arising disputes. Glaserfeld recommends teachers to place teachers to place their students into groups of three or four and assign the role of reporting back to the entire class to the one they consider having the least command of the topic38.

Pedagogical theories and practices encourage open dialogue which provides an opportunity for student’s active engagement in the construction of knowledge. It encourages effective dialogue which includes everyone, including the instructor, in a genuine exploration of questions to which none of the parties claim to know the answers. Pedagogy encourages teachers to promote a classroom e