Cognitive abilities and clear, meaningful and achievable goals.

It is important to remain viable.  What you do as a person, every day, will influence people and change lives.  There is always this moral imperative for teachers that pull at the heartstrings of everything they do and goes straight to the core of their commitment in what they do as professionals. I believe that to proceed into the future and remain viable as an educator I must create experiences, in my classroom, which will enhance students’ own viability as loving and lovable people in our society.  Online collaborative projects, inspired teamwork opportunities and access to experienced mentors are elements that can provide for a more poignant and powerful education model designed and delivered to our youth.  These new models for learning will help develop students’ cognitive abilities that can be strengthened and will endure throughout their lives.

 It eventually comes down to choice.  In education it is students that will make choices in education affecting their lives not the dictates of school officials or state mandated curriculum.  Motivation for learning is based upon interest, experience and personal goals and students will grasp upon these ideals and become makers of their own destiny given sufficient opportunities and choices in our schools to do so.  As a teacher I want to put these resources in place for my students to act. To be challenged and to investigate new outcomes.  It is critical that the focus of my effort in the classroom be directed toward creating a learning environment with enough academic scaffolding that lends sufficient support and guidance, but not so much that it diminishes student effort.  It is a delicate and sophisticated balance to achieve as students learn, but it is what is needed from our teachers in schools today.

Cognitive abilities such as making predictions, detecting causation within sequences of event, or

experimenting and rendering final judgement from the accumulation of new experiences, analysis and

collaborative work with peers are just some of the needed abilities students develop as

they learn in schools.  These skills and abilities are taught in context of

curricula opportunities designed around projects with clear, meaningful and achievable goals. The

 learning experience require the use of skills in reading, writing, performing math calculations, critical thinking about problems and solutions and proceeding in a systematic way.  These skills are instruments that are utilized by students to achieve learning outcomes. Learning is the improvement of one's cognitive processes.  One becomes increasingly apt at the acquisition and analysis of experiences to draw upon when solving problems.

SUCCESS for both students and their teacher

Teachers work to create opportunities for students to succeed in school, while keeping in mind the needs of their students striving to become happy and productive people in our society.  Immersed in this effort is a yearning for relevancy by students and teachers that transcends subject matter, grades and testing.  Relevancy, in the science curriculum, trumps both the apathy and disengagement that students and teachers fall prey to in our schools.  Useful new knowledge and understanding adds to the cognitive abilities of students marking real progress in their ability to think better.

Providing a breath and depth of experiences for students in solving problems, modeling ideas and working collaboratively is critical as a means to mentally construct processes that achieve results. Teachers who focus upon improving the cognitive abilities of students, with less emphasis on memorizing rote subject-matter, will accelerate the learning process, while supporting a learning environment that holds merit. Emphasizing cognitive processes, analytical processes and social processes as the means by which to learn, is a new education model replacing an antiquated one. The new model fulfills the needs of students by better preparing them to function and be successful in our modern society.

It is not hard to imagine learning institutions presenting academic environments that stress exploration, experimentation and reflective thought as the collective daily practice of all students in the school building.  Students acquiring the ability to make predictions based on research, completing diagnostic interpretation of data and negotiating organized methods to achieve results is the goal in education.  This effort, put forth by teachers and their students, lends well to preparing to take on future challenging tasks with problem solving abilities that are crucial for success in the real-world.