Assignment 2—Students I
Dana Huff
danahuff@vt.edu
6 March 2016
Linking Exercises
A mini-lesson that could easily be taught in fifteen minutes is how to determine
the reliability of a Web site one is using for research or school. With a preschool group,
this lesson might be extremely difficult in that I’m not sure they are developmentally
ready to determine the reliability of Web sites they use; teachers typically vet Web sites
for children at this age. Perhaps the best way to approach working with this group would
be to explain that they should only use sites their teachers tell them to use. Elementary
schoolers might be more ready to evaluate sites. I could compose a checklist activity in
which students look for certain things, such as certain kinds of domain names, update
information, author information, and contact information. Adolescents will be able to
compare different Web sites to evaluate information presented on one site as opposed to
other sites to determine which sites produce reliable information, but they still might
benefit from the guidance of a checklist or criteria. Adult learners presumably would be
able to evaluate Web sites by comparing them to other information from the Web or from
their studies. I might ask them to generate reasons how they know information they see
on the Web is reliable or not as a springboard for the lesson.
Fun and Learning I
1. Because I teach adolescents, I have chosen to observe adolescents in a setting
outside of school and to observe preschool-age children.
a. In adolescents, I expect to observe the following:
i. Some examples of formal operational thinking
ii. Signs that adolescents are experimenting with Erikson’s “Identity
versus Role Confusion” stage
iii. Signs of the onset of puberty
iv. Adolescents falling across a continuum of James Marcia’s four
identity statuses from foreclosure to identity achievement
v. An indication that the adolescents place high value on the peer
group and show allegiance to a clique or crowd.
b. In the preschool-age children, I expect to observe the following:
i. Children exhibiting increasing control over large and small
muscles
ii. Examples of egocentric thinking that result in conflicts
iii. Children engaging in a spectrum of play from solitary play
(younger preschoolers) to cooperative play (older preschoolers)
iv. Prosocial behaviors with the intervention of adults
v. Language acquisition levels that demonstrates knowledge of
conventions
2. I observed adolescents at a mall and children at a public playground.
3. For the teenage group, I sat near a group of teenagers at the food court. I
definitely saw signs that the group valued the peer group and showed allegiance
to a clique or crowd in that the group of teenagers I observed were all dressed
similarly and were discussing a concert they had recently attended. They were
clearly working on crafting identities for themselves as part of this group, which
demonstrates they are in the midst of Erikson’s Identity versus Role Confusion
crisis. Some signs of the onset of puberty that I noticed among the teenagers were
facial hair on the boys. Because of the setting, I didn’t see any clear examples of
formal operational thinking, but perhaps I would if I observed the teenagers in a
classroom setting where it might be more logical to need to use formal operations.
It is also difficult to say where on the spectrum of Marcia’s four identity statuses
the teenagers each fell, but based on the fact that they were dressed in a style
called “Goth” (black, had hair dyed, one boy wore a spiky hairstyle), I would say
they have definitely progressed past foreclosure and probably identity diffusion
and were in moratorium—I should think the kind of experimentation they were
doing with their appearances might indicate they are also experimenting with their
ideologies and occupational choices. I observed the preschool group when I took
my special-needs kindergartner to the playground. I watched two toddlers who
appeared to be about two years old. They were sitting in the sandbox engaged in
parallel play. Both were digging and playing with sand toys, but they did not
share or work together or really even interact. They were both demonstrating
control over their large muscles—one did a waddle-run toward his mother—and
fine motor skills—using the shovels. One picked up a tiny rock with a pincer
grasp. When my son tried to take a truck from another child, I told him to play
nice with the others and not take their toys, so I suppose I may have inadvertently
introduced an error in my observation by introducing a behavior I expected to
witness. Even though my son is a little older than the children I observed at the
playground, he is autistic and because of his developmental delays, he sometimes
acts “younger.” His taking the truck displayed his egocentrism in that he didn’t
consider that the other child might be upset. One of the children said “I go slide”
to his mother after he tried the slide, which was an example of an emerging
understanding of grammatical constructions.
4. The two age groups I observed were so vastly different in age that there were
more differences than similarities between the two groups, but perhaps the salient
were the comparative size and level of communication. The teenagers were fully
grown, while the preschoolers were small children, and the teenagers were
communicating on an entirely different level. The small children were talking in
small sentences and couldn’t always be completely understood.
Fun and Learning II
1. Vygotsky refers to self-talk, or thinking in your head as private speech (which is
silent when adults do it). Children sometimes do it aloud. So there are three
people, and the hats in the box consist of three red hats and two green hats. The
first person cannot turn around and see what color the others are wearing. The
second person knows what color Person 1 is wearing, but can’t see the person
behind him/her. The third person can see both of the hats in front of him/her.
None of them can see their own. I actually do logic puzzles for fun all the time,
and sometimes they lend themselves to a grid. We have more hats than people,
however, so I don’t think a classic logic problem grid would work, so I guess I’ll
just talk through it. Person 1 (and not Person 2 or 3) is the one who figures out
what color he/she has on, so he/she must have deduced the color based on what
the other two said. Person 3 would certainly have guessed he/she was wearing a
red hat if both of the hats on Person 1 and Person 2 were green because there were
only two green hats. Therefore, his/her hat isn’t green. At least one of the people
in front of her had to have a red hat, then. Person 1 should be able to figure out
then, that he/she has a 50% chance of having the red hat. Person 2, after hearing
that Person 3 doesn’t know the color of his/her hat will guess that person 3 does
not see two green hats and that Person 2 must also have a 50% chance of having a
red hat. If the person in front of him/her had on a green hat, Person 2 would guess
that he/she had on the red hat. However, if Person 1 had on a red hat, then Person
2 wouldn’t be sure his/her hat was green because there were three red hats and not
just two. Therefore, since Person 2 indicated he/she didn’t know the color of
his/her hat, then the person in front, Person 1, must have on a red hat. Person 1
would have figured this out because if neither 2 nor 3 could tell what color hats
they had, then it’s a matter of deduction based on what 2 and 3 said about what
they know.
2. I think it would help a child to draw a picture and break the instructions down into
small steps, perhaps using a graphic organizer to keep track. If a child needed
assistance to complete this puzzle, Vygotsky would say that the child was
working within his/her zone of proximal development, and the assistance I would
be providing is called scaffolding. A child would need to be able to reason
logically in order to complete this puzzle, so the child would need to be in the
formal operational stage of development (Piaget). Children at the older spectrum
of the concrete operational stage have the skills of seriation and transivity and
also are able to respond to inferred reality; however, Slavin also describes tenyear-olds as proceeding through similar problems in a chaotic fashion (39), and
clearly it helped me to think through it in a systematic way. Therefore, I would
imagine a child would need to have reached the formal operational stage to solve
it alone, but a child in the concrete operational stage could do it with some
scaffolding. Children in the formal operational stage can also “imagine several
different relationships” among the hat wearers (40).
3. I wouldn’t have been able to solve the problem without using Vygotsky’s concept
of private speech because talking through it is how I understood how to solve it. I
have clearly reached Piaget’s formal operational stage because I demonstrated the
ability to approach the problem systematically, as the adolescent in the
experiment described on p. 39 did.
Art Room
1. If a person started a family in his/her late thirties instead of the early-mid
twenties, most likely society and peers would remain important for a longer
amount of time. The Bee article states that loneliness is more prevalent in young
adults than at any other time of life aside from late, late adulthood, and without a
children and perhaps without a partner, the individual might seek out society in
order to stave off loneliness. Therefore, the line might taper more gradually
between 20 and 40 than it currently does on my chart.
2. If a child lived in an enriched environment, his/her cognitive development might
be more steep than it currently is on my chart. Research has shown that early
intervention, particularly for children born in a lower socioeconomic group, can
be beneficial in decreasing their risk of failure in school. Students who are born
in a higher socioeconomic group will have an enriched environment in their
homes and will most likely come to school already having strong emergent
literacy skills and perhaps even the ability to read and write a little. Children can
learn some of these skills in preschool if they are not born into an enriched
environment, but early intervention is important.
3. Obviously a girl who becomes pregnant at age 11 has reached puberty and has
developed the ability to reproduce; however, an 11-year-old girl is in the middle
or peak of her growth spurt, and her body is not probably not finished developing
physically aside from the sexual development she has experienced. Giving birth
may be difficult for her. Teens and preteens are probably at an increased risk of
dying during childbirth due to these kinds of complications. The hormones
produced during pregnancy may also have some impact on the girl’s physical
development. My obstetrician once said that giving birth is a traumatic
experience for one’s body, and I imagine it must be all the more traumatic if one
is not finished growing. Also, the girl’s opportunities for social development
during the critical teen years and cognitive development through more exposure
to education may be limited, which will most likely ensure she will remain in a
low socioeconomic group with which a larger number of health problems are
present because of diminished access to health services and nutritious food.
Journaling
Anyone who has ever sat with teachers at an inservice with teachers might
conclude adults are just big children. After all, they seem to revert to the kinds of
behaviors that bother them the most in their own students. However, as Slavin explains,
people develop at different rates depending on their experiences and their culture;
therefore, Piaget and Vygotsky’s ideas might have a great deal of bearing on how a
student learns, while Erikson’s ideas about personal and social development are
influential over the entire course of a lifetime.
For the most part, adults have reached the formal operational stage of Piaget’s
stages of cognitive deveopment and thus are able to reason systematically and logically
as well as consider hypothetical situations. However, culture does have an impact on
development, and depending on opportunities presented and perhaps language barriers (if
the student is from another country), it is conceivable that an adult student might not
function at the formal operational stage in all areas, particularly in my area of expertise—
English. In that case, Vygotsky’s ideas of teaching adult students in their zone of
proximal development and using scaffolding and cooperative learning might work very
well with adult students. In addition, encouraging private speech in both their own
language and English might encourage the kind of metacognition that will help the
student learn.
Erikson’s Stages of Personal and Social Development cover the entire lifespan of
an individual and could be very important in thinking about instruction for adults. For
example, those in young and middle adulthood may have families to consider as well as
careers in addition to school. With high school and many college students, it is fairly safe
for instructors to proceed as though school is the student’s job. Family and career
considerations might impact how a teacher of adults might proceed. In addition, those
students in middle adulthood are working through the crisis Erikson described as
“Generativity versus Self-Absorption” and might enjoy the productivity of being a
student again. School may help these students feel as though they are “continuing to
grow” and prevent them from feeling “a sense of stagnation and interpersonal
impoverishment” which might lead to self-absorption or self-indulgence (50).
Review
Learning about human development is critical in terms of understanding how best
to approach instructing your students. Knowing where one’s students are
developmentally will help in planning instructional activities that lie within the students’
zone of proximal development and in determining what kind of scaffolding might be
necessary. Knowing what critical issues might be percolating inside students might help
teachers be more sensitive to the students’ learning needs and will also help explain their
behavior. Additionally, understanding students’ moral development patterns is critical in
presenting oneself fairly to one’s students. The example of the teacher who bent a rule
and allowed a student who didn’t do her homework go on a field trip due to extenuating
circumstances is an excellent example of understanding where students are
developmentally in order to understand their sense of fairness, but it’s also an example of
a “teachable moment”—an opportunity for students to work within their moral zone of
proximal development.
Understanding cognitive development alone is not enough. For example, it is
important to know that preschoolers might still be refining the motor skills needed for
some school activities; therefore, teachers may need to provide scaffolding for certain
types of activities (writing and cutting with scissors, for instance). Understanding the
reasoning behind a child’s answer to a moral dilemma is important in determining
everything from classroom management to assessment. Knowing that a teacher’s
encouragement and approval is critical in the elementary grades while a teenager craves
peer acceptance can change the way a teacher approaches working with students. The
example of the boy who was embarrassed about his poetry being read in class illustrates
how peer approval matters more than teacher approval. A younger child might be
pleased to be singled out for praise in front of the whole class, but singling out a child at
the “wrong age” might harm the relationship between the teacher and student and perhaps
diminish the student’s trust in the teacher.