The Importance Of Mediation In Education

Whether you're an experienced teacher who has been teaching for 30 years, or you're just a completed your professional teaching qualification, it is imperative that you understand the learning of your students and also the development processing of their brains. When pursuing to be effective in one’s teaching, you need to be cognisant of the actual setting of the child’s knowledge and specifically where they’re located with regards to their personal learning development (Farr, 2014). This is of colossal importance because if learners don't have the proper cognitive structures they won't be able to comprehend specific concepts needed in the classroom setting and beyond. When learners are struggling to understand certain ideas, the learning then

The answer is quite simple, via mediation. In simple terms, mediation is where the educator acts out the role 'to be in the middle' of the work (or concept) and the child. Thereby guiding the learner to derive at a desired point on their own without you as the educator actually ‘putting’ the child there. This means that the mediator doesn't offer solutions, but merely fosters tangible communication between the learner and the coursework. Cooperative learning, united with a problem-centred methodology, will encourage learners to own the learning material and seek their own solutions to the problems. Again, the educator mediates this process (Nieman and Monyai,

The learners were all able to comprehend the concept and process of achieving it. The one educator had first use their hands and displayed halving. Then went to dots to reinforce the concept. The other teacher use dots and then numbers. The numbers was also her way of reinforcing the concept that was taught. Personally I have found that learners in a grade 8 Natural Science class couldn't grasp the activity given to them relating to adaptations. I had to then rephrase the instructions and then only the learners were able to do what was expected of them. This proved that I needed to be more thorough and clear when giving instructions.

With respect to cognitive structuring as a scaffolding strategy, no apparent structure to solve the problem was given to the learners from either educator. I would suggest that a 3 step method was employed. Since they are grade one learners, they would only be doing numbers 1 to 10, I would’ve suggested:

Step 1 - hold up the number with your hands that needs to be halved.

Step 2 - cut the number in half.

Step 3 - check to see if I have the same number on both