Teaching

Review what your roles, responsibilities and boundaries would be as a teacher in terms of the teacher training cycle.
Education is as fundamental to us as life itself.   From birth onwards we are learning from our parents, our siblings, our peers, our teachers, the media and of course our mistakes.   We ourselves construct our own learning styles through experiences we deal with everyday.   Within those experiences we learn about our responsibilities and roles in life and discover what boundaries we should not cross.   The same can be said for education.
As keen as many students are, we must not forget that for many this will be their first venture into education since leaving school and additionally, be they new to education or old hands, all students learn at different speeds and react to teaching in different ways.   For effective teaching to take place and to ensure all students have an equal chance of learning a good teaching method will need to be adopted.   To help in this we need to understand the way people learn.   As explained on the Learning and Teaching website (Atherton 2005), Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle (1984) gives us an idea into the progression by which students understand and process their experiences and consequently modify their behaviour.  
David Kolb, ‘ Experiential Learning Cycle’ (in Gravells, 2007:23) said:
“People learn through four distinct processes and are considered the basic steps to learning and are repeated as learning continues.   Concrete experience (feeling), reflective observation (watching), abstract conceptualisation (thinking) and active experimentation (doing)”.
So for example, when learning to ride a bicycle you may fall off after hitting a tree, thereby giving the initial experience (feeling).   Looking at why you hit the tree (reflection), considering how you can avoid hitting the tree when you try again (thinking), then trying again, putting what you have learnt into practice (doing), is Kolb’s cycle in action....