Teacher’s Role in Mediated Learning: Cognitive & Social Growth
The Role of the Teacher/Mediator
Learning is a socially mediated process, which pushes students to go beyond what they can do alone. Mediation is a process of interaction between the human organism in development and adult experience. It implements the features that guide the teaching process, established in three categories:
A) Cognitive
- Intentionality and Reciprocity: The mediator establishes goals and objectives and is selected to share with the student’s intentions in a mutual process. The reciprocity leads students to become involved in the process to achieve its objectives.
- Transcendence: Involves teaching students to conduct planning to use previously stored knowledge and project them in learning and action. It involves linking a series of activities in the future to establish “relationships.”
- Meaning: It has three requirements:
- Raise the students’ interest in the task itself.
- Discuss with students the importance of the task.
- Explain the intended purpose with the activities and implementation.
B) Self-Image
- Competence: It seeks to enhance the feeling of “being able” to create a more dynamic individual. This sense of competence is closely related to motivation and a positive self-image can encourage him to continue making progress in learning.
- Regulation and Control of Behavior: Teaching planning strategies to prevent and regulate impulsivity. Seeks to develop in the student’s behavior reflective of what to do, how, when, and why to do it. It involves monitoring and controlling their behavior in learning, to be generalized to other areas of their behavior.
- Active Participation and Shared Behavior: “Two people know what had only one knew.” Learning is not understood as individual, but it is social learning among all and for all as a social good.
- Mediation Search, Planning, and Achieving Goals: In the classroom, the mediator must teach students to set goals, both short and long-term for learning. It involves the review and check yourself with the students, why the objectives were not met, liaising with the evaluation and self-evaluation.
C) Affection
- Hymns of the Novelty and Complexity: The novel tasks arouse intellectual curiosity in students. It is necessary that the mediator strives to introduce some novelty in the work. You can lead students to design their own tasks (creativity).
- Mediation of Knowledge, Modifiability, and Change: The teacher believes in change and the modifiability of the learner. It makes conscious of that premise so that the student perceives as an active subject, capable to generate and process information, implying their potential to modify.
- Transmission of Optimism: Teachers’ mediators define students as “groups of persons amenable to change,” which requires a spirit of optimism and enthusiasm. This is what they transmit to their students, believing in its potential and instilling necessary, but realistic optimism.
- Feeling of Belonging to a Culture: The person is meaning to their existence in the host and growth experience in the family and society in living, creating an identity as having concrete referents in the environment in which they live.