Social Cognitivism Learning Log

What?

In Chapter 10, we talked about social cognitivism and how it is a combination of cognitivism and behaviorism. They believe learning is an internal process that may or may not lead to a behavior change. Just because someone doesn't exhibit the behavior, doesn't mean they didn't learn. Social cognitivism is based almost solely on learning through observation. The visual metaphor for this theory is a camera. It is recording information and than it may or may not play it back.

We talked about self-efficacy, which is the way you feel about yourself and how you can accomplish things; modeling, which is when you are demonstrating what you want your students to be doing; vicarious learning, which is when you are watching a behavior and then you do the same behavior; and self-regulation, which is how we are able to set goals for ourselves and accomplish things that we want to.

The Reciprocal Causation is a process that the social cognitivists believe has to be present or else learning won't occur. All parts of the circle must be there at all times.

So What?

Social cognitivism is one of the theories that makes perfect sense to me. With all of the theories before, I agreed somewhat but it just didn't seem like they answered all of the questions. I think that the reciprocal causation shows that all of these pieces are needed in order to complete the learning cycle. This will be very useful when teaching my own students. If we can understand their motivation and their beliefs, we will be able to create a good classroom environment that will meet those needs. Then we will be able to see the behaviors from the students that exhibit what we are encouraging them to do.

Now What?

The hardest part of this theory will be getting to know each of our students and understanding what their motivating beliefs are. This is vital to the learning process, so it will take some time to really get to know your students in order to be a great teacher. I will have to make time in an extremely busy schedule in order to understand my students. It is going to be difficult, but it is an essential piece to the puzzle.