OurColony.net

textbook

Customer Rating:
This is my textbook for my first masters in education class book. It's exciting, and I totally love it! Fun for the curious-minded and scientific-minded as well.

Great overview for educators.

Customer Rating:
This is a nice book on the important topics related to how people learn. It serves as an introductory text from which you can gather relevant references on the issues that are of the most interest to you.

The copy I bought at Amazon was defective, though. It was missing more than 20 pages!! But after I contacted the publisher, they quickly sent me a replacement book with no charge at all. (I did not try to contact Amazon for fear that the whole Amazon stock is defective in the same way.)

What all teachers should know

Customer Rating:
The tome "How Learners Learn" is what your worthless education courses SHOULD have been teaching you, but didn't because the politicians and the professors would rather push their agendas. If the teacher is to actually teach--convey information from one human to another--then the teacher must know how humans acquire information. That's what this book goes into. Oddly, that is also what outfits such as the federal department of education never go into.

Read this book; buy it if you must, borrow it if you can, but read it.

Succinct and practical

Customer Rating:
The beauty of this volume is that it takes a vast quantity of research on how people learn and organizes it in a way which is readable, practical and accessible for educators. The authors distill the findings of numerous studies into three key principles of learning: (1) Teachers must work with student preconceptions and prior knowledge, (2) Teachers must teach in depth, providing multiple examples of the same concept and (3) Teachers must help students develop metacognitive skills so that they can take control of their own learning. These principles are developed and expanded with numerous references to research and practical illustrations. It should be noted that the book is predominantly about conceptual understanding and does not spend a lot of time on how we learn skills such as playing a musical instrument or learning a language. That said, it is an extremely important contribution to discussions of pedagogy and if the advice contained in the book is heeded by teachers, curriculum writers and policy makers, it has the potential to transform many shallow classroom practices into powerful tools that will enable students to develop deep understanding. The accelerating pace of change in the 21st century means that the ability to transfer skills to unfamiliar situations as well as the skills of lifelong learning have become more important than ever. The principles contained in this book will help us prepare students for a changing world.

How people learn

Customer Rating:
If you are going to be a teacher, this is a great book to read. Detailed and easy to read, it helps prepare you for what to expect and what will be expected of you as a teacher. It makes it easy to understand how children learn and what are the best teaching strategies to use to teach them as individuals.