Behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism are three important and effective learning strategies in our day-to-day lives. We can easily find examples when learning new knowledge in the process of growing up.
I grew up in Beijing, China. When I was a kid, when I first went to kindergarten, I hated it so much. I cried and yelled every morning on the way my parents drove me to school and kept crying when I got into my classroom. But it didn’t last very long. The teacher set up some rules in the classroom; for the kids who were doing good things such as washing their hands properly or having their lunch nice and quietly without playing with their food can get cute stickers. One of the rules was not crying in the morning when parents drop us off at school. It worked perfectly. The desire of collecting cute little stickers even makes me want to go to kindergarten. This is an example of behaviourism teaching strategies. The teacher uses sticker as a reward to reinforce positive behaviours to teach us how to behave properly in different situations.
I came to Vancouver, Canada when I was in high school. I remember when I was taking chemistry class, my teacher always presents us with different chemical reactions. The experiments he did in class were mostly very cool and eye-catching, it was harder to get distracted from his class. We had a lab class which was students doing experiments in small groups under my chemistry teacher’s supervision every week. It was an extremely helpful way for me to understand different chemical equations and learn the colors of different compounds since I could see it myself. This is an example of constructivism teaching strategies my high school chemistry teacher uses. It gives students opportunities to really experience the process of chemical reaction and learn from it.
Teaching strategies play huge roles during the process of learning.