Final Blog

What:
After reviewing several of my other blogs and thinking about what I believe learning to be, I have decided that my theory would be that most students learn by interest. This is not so simple as it sounds... you must consider what does interest mean. Interest defined by dictionary.com is "the feeling of a person whose attention, concern, or curiosity is particularly engaged by something." Thus in my theory attention (particularly concern and/or curiosity) must be met. To met interest must include to important things: 1. the student must already have the appropriate "readiness" or preparation to be interested -- no one is interested in things that they have completely no idea or preparation for; 2. Lastly the student find the subject matter applicable in someway, or it will have no affect and will presumably be lost with short-term memory.
So What:
I believe my theory will be very "real" and valuable in my classroom. I believe it will be real because I know it is truly apart of my beliefs about education (not that I didn't enjoy learning from other theorists, but I didn't like, believe or trust everything we learned), and I feel it will be valuable because I feel spiking students interests is the beginning of worlds, doors, and learning. We have all been that student that, in some situation, just needed something to be interested in the subject matter -- interest, personal connection, and readiness might have made a world of difference in that content. As a future English teacher I am lucky because I have a whole world of text to self connections in novels, stories and poems, but how relative and worthwhile is the material if the students are not interested? Or if the have no previous knowledge or skills to find interest in it? Obviously, if the students find no value there is no value for them because they wont learn it! For me, my classroom philosophy will be to inspire students to think for themselves and to achieve my philosophy goals I will have to peek their interest. I believe learning should be exploring thoughts, ideas, concepts and connections, but exploration can only occur when there is a reason to explore-- Interest!
Now What:
In my future classroom I will implement my personal theory through first a student intelligence test (creating interest through their abilities), evaluation of students KWL on certain types of literature, observation of classroom culture and student grades (Hootie tootie British literature is going to cut it if I have a room full of lower class Harlem students), and student opinion - let the student choose once in a while what they want to learn.
I feel to accomplish my goal to peek student interest and inspire critical thinking skills, I will need a little more education on adolescent development, particularly the brain. The brain is so immersed in personality and development, that I feel it would be helpful to study more in hopes to understand my students, their interests, and their abilities better.
Further I feel that a more in depth examination and study of Kohlberg's moral development stages would help me understand and maximize appropriate student morality level thinking. In life everyone is fascinated by morality and the positive and negative effects of it, thus understanding my students moral development will help them increase their own personal moral development by implementing zone of proximal development morality topics.