1. Are you currently working with or have you ever worked with adolescents? Explain.
I have worked with and still work with adolescents. In the teaching process, I get to
observe the students grow and develop from grade 9 to grade 12 and I also note the
challenges some of them undergo when I do one-on-one counseling sessions.
2. What do you hope to learn in this course about the adolescent experience in your
current or future work with adolescents?
In this course, I hope to learn to better understand adolescents and how to support them
during adolescence. Adolescents often have identity crises because of prolonged
schooling. In my country, the age of consent is 18 years, which is ideal for a student in
grade 12.
Further tertiary education often prolongs dependency on parents which means that most
of the decisions concerning the student will still be made by the parents, yet they
physically and mentally feel that they are adults and should be making decisions on
personal issues.
Another challenge faced is society and parents ignoring the adolescent’s sexual
maturation. According to Freud, students are in the genital stage of development and
would want to express their sexuality.
“It is a time of adolescent sexual experimentation, the successful resolution of
which is settling down in a loving one-to-one relationship with another person in
our 20″s.” (Kuhn, 2008).
If done publicly, this is considered to go against societal norms and rebellion because the
adolescents are still dependent.
3. Explain one or two concepts you have learned about adolescence from the required
readings/video thus far?
An important concept I have learned is the relationship between development and
learning. Here, I have learned that the development process lags behind the learning
process. I have also learned that tests give an impression of the actual development level
of the learner at a particular time, the same students when guided by an adult or a teacher
can achieve more denoting the potential developmental level.
“Thus, the notion of a zone of proximal development enables us to propound a
new formula, namely that the only ‘good learning’ is that which is in advance of
development.” (Vygotsky, 1978).
This, therefore, means that for optimum learning to be achieved, rote learning and
memorization should be supplemented by collaboration among students and teacher
guidance.
4. Explain how you will incorporate these ideas into an educational setting.
The ideas gotten from the course can be gradually incorporated into day-to-day teaching
and learning. This is because the curriculum in place is exam-oriented and emphasizes on
results of the summative assessment. This has led to rote learning and memorization by
the students. Teachers also stress memorization and drill the students before exams. This
is because the teacher’s performance is also judged by the student’s results.
Therefore, progressive behavior change is required from both teachers and learners to
address adolescents’ challenges and improve learning. Mackatiani (2017), states that
teachers devise approaches to repetitively review past lessons, drill the students, and
revise past examination paper analysis so that the learners can memorize answers to pass
national exams.
References.
Kuhn, D. (2008). Formal operations from a twenty-first-century perspective. Human
Development, 51(1), 4855. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26763967). Formal operations
from a twenty-first-century perspective. Human Development, 51(1),
4855. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26763967
Mackatiani, C., I. (2017). Influence of examination-oriented approaches on quality
education in primary schools in Kenya. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1143881.pdf
Vygotsky, L. (1978). The interaction between learning and development. In Vygotsky, L,
Mind in Society. Harvard University Press. http://ouleft.org/wpcontent/uploads/Vygotsky-Mind-in-Society.pdf Or You can refer to Reading 4 - The
Interaction between Learning and Development.