Significant Learning
Medetating over Meaningful Method
Why meaningful learning?
Because learning has to have meaning, understanding, retention of knowledge and transition of skills. Nowadays it cannot be based on learning based on memory and repetition - no matter how much we remember it, what do we do with it? What will it serve us for?
Meaningful learning is learning new knowledge that does have to do with the student's prior knowledge.
Meaningful learning is what motivates the student to learn and want to learn.
The student has to understand and know why he is learning a topic, a unit, a rule, etc. As a teacher of Jewish history, if I don't use meaningful learning, what do I intend to do with a topic about the Holocaust, if I don't teach with the meaningful learning method? Should I ask the students to remember the dates and the names of the gethos in each place in Germany and Poland?Really, is it important?Using the Meaningful learning. Am I going to guide my students so that they can understand why the Holocaust started? How did people lose their human image by acting without reason and without conscience? These are the important issues to understand what happened and to know that the person who organized this long and inexplicable event was not a crazy person, but a man with a lot of mental capacity used cruelly. So that you can understand these historical factors and what is behind each one - it is my duty to use meaningful learning