Learning Theories

Movie: The Renaissance Man

This movie compares and contrast different learning theories like: behaviorism, which is also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do including acting, thinking and feeling can and should be regarded as behaviors. It also shows cognitivism, which has two major components, one methodological, the other theoretical. Methodologically, cognitivism adopts a positivist approach and the belief that psychology can be fully explained by the use of experiment, measurement and the scientific method. This is also largely a reductionist goal, with the belief that individual components of mental function can be identified and meaningfully understood. The second is the belief that cognition consists of discrete, internal mental states (representations or symbols) whose manipulation can be described in terms of rules or algorithms. For last this movie also presents the constructivism theory. Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own “rules” and “mental models,” which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences.

We can see these learning theories through the entire movie. The students are in the army, they are used only to follow instructions. Then the teacher decided to let them pick something they wanted to write and something they wanted to write. That is where constructivism is shown. They were interested and motivated of what the teacher was reading and that interest engaged them into the reading process. During that learning process we could see some learning techniques like group work, role play, communicative language theory, presentation, practice and production (PPP). It was shown the audio-lingual method, because the students were talking and listening to understand language. As a result, after all these methods and techniques the students were able to apply what they learned in different situations. They felt engaged with the course. The teacher demonstrated them that he cared about the students.

As a conclusion I think that, the best way to keep engaged students into learning language is, loving ourselves the language, loving reading in order to motivate them to love and engaged them into learning language too.