Have you ever met many someone who struggle with socially interacting with their peers, friends, co-workers etc? Social learning is important because people learn new behaviors through observation. Furthermore in my experience with social learning, students have learned how to interact with other students though past learned behaviors. For example I work with students that are emotionally disturbed and one of my students tends to use a lot of profanity when he is talking to his peers. This behavior had to be learned while interacting with his friends when he was young or he may have learned that behavior through living in community or home. Basically the students culture or background can play a role in how a student may act or interact with his peers, co -workers etc.
In this week course resources we learned about social constructivism theory and how it suggests that student knowledge is constructed first in a social context and that social context is shared with other individuals. When students began to collaborate with each other the results in learning is constructing or building understanding through social learning.
The instructional strategy for this week is cooperative learning. Cooperative learning focus on having students interact with each other in groups thus enhances their learning. Cooperative learning, “provides an environment where students can reflect upon newly acquired knowledge, process what they are learning by talking with and actively listening to their peers and develop common understanding about topics” (Pitler, Hubbell, and Kuhn, 2012, p13).
