Educational Psychology and Teacher Decision Making - Chapter 1

What?
Educational psychology is an academic discipline that (a) systematically studies the nature of learning, child development, motivation, and related topics and (b) applies its research findings to the identification and development of effective instructional practices. In the book it talks about decision making and educational research. These things are closely related because the decisions we make as teachers may come directly from educational research. There are three types of research. Correlational, experimental, and descriptive. Each type of research has its own pros and cons. We need to understand that educational research is a huge aspect of teaching and we need to be aware of as many research findings as we can.
So What?
I kind of started talking about this in the last section, but we need to understand where all these educational theories are coming from and why certain people and teachers believe in different theories. We can conduct educational research in our own classrooms. I think that if we do not we are doing the students a disservice because we will not be teaching to our students needs. I have been in many classrooms and had many teachers. I have had teachers who did not care about the needs of the class and taught to their liking. I have also been in classes where the teacher took an interest in what form of instruction worked better in that particular class and my learning benefited from it.
Now What?
I will be implementing educational research as a part of my career because I want to better myself to be the best educator that i can be. I know that that is a little cliche. I want my students to be well educated in my content area, but more importantly I want to have an impact on their lives and teach them life lessons. Compiling some sort of educational research will assist me in understanding the students that i will be teaching at that very moment. I cannot have a mould that I will teach from my entire career. To be honest, that is what I am looking forward to the most, teaching students life lessons that they will carry with them forever, not just a concept in history that they will forget as soon as they are finished with the class.