THE RECIPE FOR LEARNING

Jon McClelland, Harvard Psychologist, has stated that the three ingredients to successful learning are:  Wanting to learn, knowing how to learn, and Having a chance to learn.

   

    Learning is the acquisition of a new behavior through the desire to obtain what a person wants when he/she needs to create, to analyze, to solve, to improve. It is the ability everybody wants to develop to do an activity, a way to control and manage emotions. It is also the adaptation to live in society, to create new thoughts. Learning is the way people act and react facing adequately the daily life events. Knowledge is part of life, people need to learn in order to grow and vice versa.

    

     There is a connection between goals and learning, goals make people want to learn. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation has a strong power and emotional impact in learning. I always wanted to learn English, I wondered how people could understand other languages, I found and I still find it fascinating. That intrinsic motivation made me study English.

     If a person likes and enjoys doing certain activities, it is easier for him/her learn it. It is also important to take into account the concepts and activities that work best for each individual. Motivation and interests are crucial to focus all attention in acquiring information. The understanding of these cognitive processes has given answers to the creativity and memory problems.

    The time of learning starts when the person interacts in different situations, all those needs of environment make people choose what the best way to acquire knowledge is. Knowing How to learn really gives a person the right clues and tools to make that learning meaningful, theory described by Paul David Ausubul, where he describes learning through relationships a person has from before. Learning by doing, through practice, repetition, in order to do it better each time. What people want to do and how they adapt their behavior to different situations make them efficient by improving learning styles. 

    Finally we can conclude that all learn differently, it can be through stimulus and responses, through transference from a generation to another, through searching, through trial and error, etc. We have the same opportunities to learn, and everyday people have a chance to learn. According to Piaget’s theory a child does not need to go to a school to learn how to eat correctly or to say mom or dad; he/she does it at home, from the environment, not always conscious about that. He/she just observes people around and imitated what they do or say, it is not a hard task. We learn things everyday and they are not necessarily taught by teachers, we learn to face daily life, we learn ways to interact with other people, we learn from things we are repeating everyday , it is part of our development and evolution as human beings.