New Culture of Learning: Collaborative Discussion

All people are different and therefore learn in unique ways. A learning style refers to an individual’s approach to learning based on three things: their strengths, weaknesses, and preferences. The most recent learning style today is being naturalistic. Learning is apart of our daily lives, rather we want to or not we are always learning. It’s something that just comes naturally.

A teacher’s role is to make informed and intelligent decisions about practice to achieve various outcomes with and for students in their classes. They must make judgements about how best to help their students learn in the environments in which they teach. Teachers are mostly responsible for motivating and guiding learning principles and styles, rather than just teaching. According to Dr. Tony Bates, “Building an effective learning environment”, states that teaching is incredibly context- specific so the learning environments must be suitable to the context. For this reason, every teacher or instructor needs to think about and build their own learning environment that is appropriate to the context in which they are working.

However, the learners must do the learning. We need to make sure that learners can work within an environment that helps them do this. In other words, our job as teachers is to create the conditions for success. There are no right or wrong ways to build an effective learning environment. It needs to fit the context in which students will learn. Before even thinking of designing a course or program, we should be thinking of what this learning environment could look like.

Bates, T. (Dec. 14, 2015). Building Effective Learning Environments. https://youtu.be/3xD_sLNGurA

TEDx Talks. (2012, September 13). A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U