Mrs. Maneri's Blog: 2018

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development

My Cultural Self

My Cultural Self

I wanted to start out my cultural self with my family tree, I created a simple family tree using www.familyecho.com. On my family tree I included my grandparents, their children (including my parents), and then my nuclear family. I did not add all of my cousins and their kids because there are over 40 of them and I think it would become more confusing.

As you can see my parents came from two very different family sizes; my maternal grandmother had 10 children (5 boys and 5 girls) with my mom being the 8th born, while my paternal grandmother only had two children and my dad being the youngest. Interestingly enough my parents grew up across the street from each other.

My parents had my sister Sarah first, and after about 5 months decided that she was great but they could probably do better. 9 months later they had me, realized I was perfect and that there was no way they were going to do better than me, so they stopped after two children. Obviously I am joking, but I do find that a funny way to say that my parents had two kids, my sister and I are only 14 months apart, and I am the younger sibling.

I do think that the gender roles in my family were/are pretty average for an American household. The only gender roles that were a little different in my family is that my mom made more money than my dad, and my mom is 4 years older than my dad. My mom is a registered nurse, she went to college in the early 80's and earned her AA and her nursing degree. Recently the nursing industry has changed and new nurses are expected to have earned a BA; in order to keep up with the competition and for job security my mom earned her BA on a full scholarship last spring. My dad went to college for a few semesters but did not finish, but honestly, my dad is very smart but I believe he has a reading disability that was never dealt with as a young child. He talks about how he always struggled with reading and how he felt like the teachers he had just passed him along when he wasn't at the level he was supposed to be. By the time he got to college he was so behind there was no way he would finish. When I was younger he was worked as a truck driver, delivering paint to commercial buildings and offices. When I was in my early 20's my dad bought a sandwich shop and ran that until he had a minor heart attack and decided it was too stressful for his health. Now my dad drives for Uber!

I never thought about it, but I actually don't know the education level of any of my grandparents. Both my maternal grandparents were orphans, meaning they didn't have family support, so I don't know. My grandma was a nurse, and she my mom has a picture of her in her whites that looks like a graduation picture, I would assume she went to college. My grandpa worked for the City of Los Angeles, and I have no idea what he actually did. My paternal grandparents got divorced when my dad was young, his dad worked in a factory or construction of sometype, as passes away when my dad was a teenager, so I don't believe he went to college. My step grandpa and my grandma owned a business together, and I have no idea if they went to college.

My entire family speaks English and doesn't know any other languages fluently.

My family doesn't really have rules regarding marriage or dating. When I was living with my parents my boyfriend couldn't sleep over and I had to keep my bedroom door open if I had a boy in my room. Once I moved out I didn't have any rules. I assume my parents wouldn't have loved me bringing home a gang member boyfriend or something like that, but I wouldn't date someone like that anyways.

My parents are Christians, so the majority of our special occasions are the typical Christian ones. Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Easter and pretty typical with presents, turkey, and eggs hunts. Birthdays we got out to dinner at whatever restaurant the birthday person wants to go to. Other than that we don't have any traditions.

My parents and grandparents were all born in the US. My maternal family is Hungarian and Irish, and my paternal family is English and Native Canadian. So I am pretty much caucasian with a sprinkle of Native Indian.

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Development and Learning Theories

Throughout history there have been philosophers that have come up with many theories to explain how humans develop and learn. Some of the more famous philosophers include Vygotsky, Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erikson. This blog post will talk about 5 learning theories that came from these philosophers and how they can be implemented in a classroom setting.

1. Piaget: Cognitive Development
Piaget did not believe that intelligence was fixed, he believed that it was molded by biological maturation as well as how the child interacts with its surroundings. There are three parts of his theory Schemas, Adaptation, and Stages of Cognitive Development. I am going to focus on the stages of cognitive development. Here is a chart that shows each stage.

psyc479.weebly.com/genetic-epistemology.html

Its important to note that even though most diagrams label an age group for each stage Piaget did not claim that the stages would be reached at or by a particular age.

Implementing this theory into the classroom would first involve knowing which stage the student or students were currently in. Once I understand the stage I could manipulate my lesson plan so that the students could better understand the concepts. Our text book gives a great example of a student who is entering the concrete phase. "If, for example, we wish to teach him about fractions, we should not draw diagrams... we should allow him to divide concrete objects into parts." (Crain page 144).

2. Piaget: Schema
Next we are going to talk about another aspect of Piaget's theory, Schema. This is the idea that repeatable actions build meaning. When a child is in a familiar situation they are able to explain and perceive what is around them. For example, when I was a young child I understood what happened in a drive thru restaurant, we would drive up, order, pay, get our food at the window, and while at the window you could smell the food cooking inside. One day, I was about 3 or 4 year old, my mother said we were going to get Mcdonald's, what I didn't know what that we were going to the bank first (drive thru ATM). When we pulled up to the bank window I assumed we were at Mcdonalds and proclaimed loudly "MMMM I can smell those fries!!", which was probably something my mom had said at some point before. My mom loved to embarrass me with that story, but its a great example of Schema.

In the classroom Schema can be implemented specifically in a daily routine, if students know that everyday when they return from lunch they are expected to pull out a book a silently read, they will start to do it automatically. In the bigger picture Schema is started on the first day of preschool or kindergarten, students learn that if they have something to say they need to raise their hand or if they have to use the restroom they need to ask for permission. These are rules that stick with them throughout their education.

3. Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development: Stage 1
Kohlberg theory of moral development had 3 main stages, and each stage has sub stages. The three main stages are Pre-conventional morality, Conventional Morality, and Post conventional Morality. This section is going to focus on the first stage, pre-conventional morality. This stage is when the child does not have its own moral code, but instead bases their code on the code that their parents and other authority members have shown them. This children know the rules based on the consequences they are given for breaking the rules, and fear of consequences is enough to keep them from breaking the rules. There are two substages within this stage.

https://www.simplypsychology.org/kohlberg.html

This stage is usually for children below the age of 9, and would be seen in classrooms below 4th grade. This can be seen very strongly in kindergarten and first grade classrooms that use a colored card behavior chart as classroom management. This classroom management technique starts all students day with a yellow card, if they are good they get to move up to a green card, and if they are disruptive or not following rules they have to move down to a red card. Students know what expectations are to earn a green card or a red card, and are usually very upset when they have a red card, because they know its a negative consequence. This technique does now work for older students because the red card itself isn't a punishment if you know better. Imagine an adult instead of going to jail for committing a crime the judge just made you change your card from yellow to red.

4. Vygotsky: Language and Private Speech

Vygotsky believed that social interactions were the main way that humans learn language. He believed that in the beginning parts of life language and thought are separate until joining together around the age of 3. Thoughts become less of a general memory of things and more of a internalized verbal conversation. Children use private speech to plan activities and strategies, the book gives an example of a mother telling her child that they are going to the park and she should grab her shovel and pail. Later when the child is in the private speech phase they are able to recall this and when the mother says they are going to the park the child will ask themselves where their shovel and pail is. Children are more likely to use private speech when they don't have a parent or teacher readily available to help them work through a problem.

In the classroom the teacher can help students create private speech while reading independently by giving them examples of questions to ask themselves. The teacher can do this by reading out loud to the class often and asking the same questions like "what is a theme in this story?", "which characters are the main characters?", "does this story have a moral?". Repeating these questions and discussing them out loud withe the class will help the students ask themselves these questions while reading independently.

5. Erikson: Stages of Psychosocial Development: Stage 4
Erikson believed that throughout life humans go through 8 stages of psychosocial development, with 5 of the stages being before the age of 18. Each stage gave the person a crisis that could have a good or bad effect of their personality development and each stage built off of the stage before it. The stage I am going to focus on today is stage 4, Industry vs Inferiority. Stage 4 takes place between the ages of 5 and 12, which is basically all of elementary school. In this stage parents, teachers, and peers will be a major source of building or hurting the child's self-esteem. The child will want to gain approval from the important people in their life by showing competence in areas that are valued by society and will gain pride for accomplishments and shame for failures.

As a teacher it is important to help students going through this phase by encouraging them to work hard on things they are struggling with, let them know that it is okay to fail as long as you keep trying. The teacher should help their peers to make positive and helpful criticism if another student is struggling. Basically just make sure that the student feels supported in their faults and modesty in their accomplishments.

Work Cited

Crain, W. C. (2016). Theories of development: Concepts and applications. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Genetic Epistemology. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://psyc479.weebly.com/genetic-epistemology.html

Jean Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/piaget.html