Throwback Thursday... The forgotten blog posts... Situated Cognition and the Knowledge Principle

This week I learned that situated cognition is an idea that challenged previous beliefs about learning and knowledge. This idea centers around the concept that learning needs to be situated in the context it is practiced in. So for studying something like vocabulary, students need to actually be using the terms in the context they are going to be used in to truly learn the meaning of different words. 

            This connects to what I do as a teacher because if you accept this idea as true it requires teachers to re-think what they teach and how they teach it. For me this seems to mean that I need to focus on designing learning activities where students can learn by doing. Lesson design needs to revolve around the idea of creating authentic problems where students can interact with real-world type problems so that they understand both the content and the real-world applications where they may need the knowledge they’ve just built. 

           

I have found this somewhat difficult to plan for as a history teacher. There are only so many times you can ask students to be museum curators before they start feeling like the assignments you are giving them are less and less authentic.