Republic of the Philippines CEBU TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY Main Campus M.J. Cuenco Ave., Cor., R. Palma St., Cebu City Website: http://www.ctu.edu.ph E-mail: information@ctu.ph Tel. No. +6332 402-4060 loc 1137 COLLEGE OF EDUCATION CHRISTINE MAY P. SEVILLENO REFLECTIVE WRITING NO. 1 Principle 1: Children’s beliefs or perceptions about intelligence and ability affect their cognitive functioning and learning. This principle explains that children have different beliefs about their intelligence. Some children learn that intelligence is fixed. Others believed that intelligence is changeable. Children who believed that intelligence is fixed may find hard to accept failure and takes time to cope with it. Children who believed in changeable intelligence may think and treat failure as a learning opportunity to try harder.These belief of children are molded by their environment - parents, caretakers, or even teachers. Educators should provide different learning opportunities to these children so they can develop belief that learning can be changeable. These activities includes academic tasks with multiple approaches, tasks that provide the children some challenges. Tasks that provide children a lot of ways to solve problems, not just a single and easy solution. Teachers should also praise the students or criticize them appropriately. Inappropriate feedback may lead to even more negative effect of children’s intelligence beliefs. Principle 2: What children already knows affect their learning. This principle explains about conceptual growth and conceptual change. Conceptual growth is easier which is incorporating new knowledge into what children have already known. Conceptual change is when children revised or changed previous understanding because the new knowledge doesn’t coincide with the previous one. This is true to my son. He always thinks that what he learns when watching youtube is all true. When I happen to teach him concepts, he easily added what he has learn in the videos that he had watched. But when the concepts that I tried to teach him does not signify to the videos that he had watched, learning becomes hard. As I read this principle, it makes me think that as a parent, or as a teacher as well, children really requires an efficient strategies that would suit them. Teachers should assess their students as to what level of learning there is. As a teacher and as a parent, we should use motivations that are relevant to the learning. And let children play an active role inside or outside the classroom. Principle 3: Children’s cognitive development and learning are not limited by general stages of development This principle states that stages development are not linked to a particular age or grade level. That children can be capable of higher thinking skills and their reasoning can be facilitated in a more advanced levels. This can be true to my five-year old son and my five-year old niece. I have been exposing my son to alphabet starting at an early age. At the present, my son already knows how to read compared to my niece who was not exposed to certain things. I can say that children can learn advance context when they are given advanced materials. But these materials must be facilitated gradually and appropriately. Environment where children have lived has a great impact in their cognitive development. When they interact with older people, or when they always observed how older people interact, children tends to mimic their interaction as older people. Same goes with cognitive and learning. They learn what we give them. Principle 4: Learning is based on context, so generalizing learning to new contexts is not spontaneous but instead needs to be facilitated. Children’s ability to process contexts is an essential part of their learning. Learning new knowledge does not automatically happens to them, especially when the new context is not similar from what they have already known. Instead, they learn in a variety of contexts and it needs to be properly facilitated. Teachers should provide a lot of learning opportunities that helps children connect previous knowledge into a new one. Helping children make connections about the contexts and real life by giving them concrete reality examples. Asking them to make connections between what they learn at school and their lives at home.Exposing children to certain places where the contexts can be learn is a much brighter idea than just let them sit in a classroom during the whole session. Transferring skills can be best obtained when it is properly facilitated, when children are encouraged, and when they are supported by the people around them.
