The article by Ertmer and Newby (2013) deeply resonated with my own experience as an instructor. In particular I agreed with the following statement \u201cThe practitioner cannot afford to ignore any theories that might provide practical implications\u201d (p. 62). I came to the profession of instructing adult learners with a long background of experience in teaching young children. The three theories of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism were not new to me. In my role as an instructor I quickly drew many parallels between my experienced knowledge of teaching children and my new task of teaching adult learners. The connections I saw became very pronounced when I entered the world of online teaching. In the physical classroom I would often, and still do, go with my intuition of how I could teach a particular concept. Online however, I needed to become very clear in what I wanted my learner to take away and how a chosen teaching strategy could make that possible. Teaching online challenged me to revisit prior chosen learning theories and rediscover why I wanted to apply them in a given situation. Ertmer and Newby (2013) write about “systematic eclecticism” (Snelbecker, 1998) explaining how as learning designers, and I believe also as instructors, we need to be well versed in the three mostly used learning theories, and know when to apply one over the other. I think it was during the last course when I realized, that even though I proclaim myself to be a social constructivist, I actually do select different learning theories depending on my students abilities and the learning experience I need to create. As an early childhood educator I have long called myself eclectic in my teaching approach with children, maybe it is time I acknowledge my eclectic approach as an instructor of adult learners as well. I wonder if any other instructors out there are reflecting on similar experiences?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Reference<\/p>\n
Ertmer, P., & Newby, T. (2013 Online).\u00a0.\u00a0Performance Improvement Quarterly<\/em>, 26(2), 43-71.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The article by Ertmer and Newby (2013) deeply resonated with my own experience as an instructor. In particular I agreed with the following statement \u201cThe practitioner cannot afford to ignore any theories that might provide practical implications\u201d (p. 62). I came to the profession of instructing adult learners with a long background of experience in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lrnt524"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0053\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}