Lifespan Development Blog 8

     Lifespan psychology has been truly beneficial to my overall learning experience and my future teaching career.  I am really praying for my ability to retain this learning so that I can apply it in my classroom in the very near future.  There was a quote in this week’s reading, Theories of Childhood that read, “Theories need to be real to the developing teacher.”  I will need to understand the theory and the development, not the theorist who said it, with that in mind, I thought it was important to make connections with some of these philosophies and how they could be applied in the classroom. 

     John Dewey was the founder of progressive education; he believed that education should be child-centered.  Students should be able to guide their own learning by choosing topics that are interesting to them.  The teacher has the task of making these topics meaningful to the educational process.  Although, Dewey thought education should be fun, he did not believe that it should be fun for fun’s sake.  Dewey believed that when students are engaged in learning, in activities that they are interested in, learning becomes enjoyable.  Many of Dewey’s principles can be seen in the early childhood setting, but I can see how his theories are important in any elementary setting.  I will find ways to make connections to the things that my students want to learn about.  I will be committed to integrating their interests in a meaningful way, in a way that will encourage them to be lifelong learners.

       One of Erik Erikson’s major challenges that he poses to teachers is considering the individual learner.  As an assistant, I have seen many teachers unknowingly ascribe certain characteristics to student behaviors.  Students are lazy when they don’t finish work, or are tired in class.  Students are smart when they are extremely quiet in class and passively follow directions.  Erikson teaches us that we need to know our students, and their distinct family situations and stages of development in order to teach effectively.  A student, who doesn’t finish work, may be having vision problems, difficulty reading text or any number of issues that might have nothing to do with being lazy.  A student that doesn’t participate in class may be hiding a problem that they are having with learning. 

     Piaget found value in the process of student understanding and not just finding correct answers.  When I was in seventh grade I felt extremely challenged by math.  I didn’t understand the equations and couldn’t figure out how to make algebra work for me.  No matter how often I heard teachers and tutors say, “just plug in the numbers, it’s simple,” it never felt that way.  As I think about Piaget and his theories I would suggest that he would have started much smaller with a me, a girl who couldn’t correspond x, y and z to real numbers.  He would say that I needed to understand the why, of what I was trying to accomplish.  Although I may have still got the answers wrong, I would have understood the process.

     Understanding how correlated child development is to education will help me understand my students in a way that will not only help them in my classroom, but will also help them with the social and emotional tools that they need in life.  I look forward to applying these theories in the classroom.