Educational Theories Guiding Educational Experience
Description of an education event experienced
I am a dentist, and I have started a course on teaching dentistry. My experience with education was never a particularly encouraging one as my teacher was always absent. When I was at school, the teachers went on strike, and that left us with no attention from them. We had to do much of the studying alone, and all required research lay squarely on our shoulders in the absence of teachers for as long as they were striking. Whenever the teachers came around school, they applied a work to rule strategy and that was extremely devastating. Lecturers were never available for any extra consultation, and we had to take our learning as individual responsibilities instead of waiting for support or guidance from lecturers. Any difficulties, which we may have faced during the study never, had a chance in the lecturers mind. They only offered the basics of teaching and left us on our own.
Many are occasions when we could depend on our own efforts and one day, we sat in a room with a book and had to teach ourselves. The teacher did not provide homework and clearly had no lesson plans. Teachers provided what they thought and felt was essential without any clear concern for our fate. The effect their actions had on our educational experience was extremely negative and, furthermore, as students, we had nothing to do with their reason for going on strike. It was an unusually unethical move for our teachers to leave us grappling with education in the absence of their guidance. Worse, more, even on occasions when they appeared in class, their interest in our performance remained questionable. This was because of their lack of guiding materials like lesson plans and assistive experiments through assignments. It affected me and made me promise myself never to be like him and always do my best for whoever is relying on me. When we could never have our teachers in class, learning took a new angle, as we had to find means of making up for the hours lost when our teachers went on strike. The interaction with fellow students became an experience, which has influences our educational lives. Teachers' performance influences the ability of students to improve their educational lives by giving them a safe environment for learning.
Feelings about the event
This event is something that has changed my view about education. I find it that it is essential to help students with the learning using the facilitation theory (Buchanan & Hyde, 2008). On most occasions, students need the presence of the lecturer to give them social support through learning. Through facilitative learning, the teacher uses the humanist approach whereby an educator facilitates the learning process. Our teachers overlooked this need by neglecting us and leaving us to struggle on our own. In the absence of our teachers, we had to rely on the social learning theories. That promoted our taking up of the learning process as personal responsibilities, after which, we helped each other with the required needs for our educational needs. We had to emulate the learning tactics of each other, and through group work, we managed to make up for the lectures lost during the period when our teachers were on strike (Booker, 2008).
The social learning theory promotes the ability of learners to take up a combination of cognitive learning theories and observational learning theories into practice. There was serious absence of our teachers, but students were always present meaning we had the opportunity of learning from the influences of our classmates (Buchanan & Hyde, 2008). Those who proved interested in learning acted as motivators to those who had no skills of how to go about learning in the absence of the teachers. With time, all the students had learnt to emulate the proper study deeds of the other students through observation. This experience made me realize that education can be taken as a social development approach. As much as we did it in a desperate effort for making up for the absence of our teachers, it is still relevant to realize the effects, which group work, have on learning. Group work helped us into appreciating the efforts of each other in the classroom. Learning became a social effort, which every member collaboratively took part in with dedication.
Teacher led education comes with many restrictions and rules for students to follow. When teachers are absent, and students must make up for their educational excellence, learning takes the angle of becoming a personal initiative (Buchanan & Hyde, 2008). The facilitative theory makes students overly dependent on teachers and in cases where teachers are absent as it was...
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