Psychology Module Five

     This week’s chapter on the social and cognitive development of adolescents should be renamed, “The A-Z bible of understanding Teens.”  As a parent, I often marvel at the behavior of my children. They are wonderful young men, eighty-nine percent of the time.  The other eleven percent is riddled with arguing over who will eat the last doughnut in the box, take control of the remote, or who is staring at whom while we’re eating dinner.  Chapter eight tells us that adolescence marks a transition into a time where children are beginning to improve upon executive functioning and learning how to critically think.  Reinforcing that this is a time for growth and learning in children gives me a renewed patience for some of those nagging behaviors that drive me insane.

     Executive functions are the self-regulating skills that we use everyday to accomplish almost everything.  These functions help us make decisions, plan and organize, control our emotions, and shift between situations.  So when I’m wondering why my son is wearing the same pair of pants three times a week, or how he can function in such a messy room, I think that it is important to recognize that I should be supporting the development of his executive processing skills.  My first instinct is always to correct his mistakes, but this week’s chapter made me wonder how I could support him in making his own decisions. I think that it would be more beneficial to my son for me to ask questions that help guide his own thinking, and provide information on why things are acceptable or unacceptable.  If I want to raise a child with the ability to critically think, to use convergent and divergent thinking, then I need to be able to support that growth.

     I think that another important factor in supporting the cognitive growth of teenagers is encouraging the development of their own identities.  Erik Erikson says that adolescence is the fifth stage in his psychosocial theory of development, that of identity versus identity confusion.  Erikson sees adolescence as a time of intensive exploration and analysis of oneself.  Adolescents battle with a newfound concern with how they appear to others.  When the adolescent is at odds with what they do well, for example being an exemplar student, but not being considered a ‘popular’ kid in school they can experience some identity confusion. It is essential to help children develop confidence, set personal goals, and not define their success in life by the success or standards of others.

Module Four

     There are things that I struggle to say as an adult.  I have often reflected on my life and thought about how somewhere in my social development I learned that it was inappropriate to speak up for myself.  I learned that it was kind to filter my thoughts and feminine to be dainty and meek.  I learned that it was okay for boys to be loud and outgoing and to sometimes go against the grain.  As an adult, I battle this gender stereotype that was created within me so long ago.  I make an effort to speak out when I have something to share and express myself when I feel that something is important. I realize how important this attribute is to success.  Somehow we believe that it is okay for boys to be superheroes and girls to be victims or maidens.  I think it is so important as a parent and future teacher to make sure we aren’t labeling boys and girls with stereotypes and that we are asking students to challenge the stereotypes that already internally exist. What kind of world would we live in if boys didn’t cook and girls couldn’t be astronauts?

     When I reflect on all of the reasons that I struggle with speaking up, I also recognize that it can be even more challenging for children to express their feelings, especially when those feelings may be surrounding abuse or neglect.  There are many developmental aspects of play.  Play is something that children engage in for the sake of being enjoyable.  Vygotsky believed that play contributes significantly to cognitive development.  He believed that through play children learn to think more abstractly and symbolically and therefore more capable to think within the zone of proximal development.  Play enables students to explore less concrete principles, develop solutions and work through consequences.  Children learn important social skills, how to share and problem solve, all in an imaginary and safe place.  Chapter seven gives us ideas on how to effectively use play to help kids developmentally as well as how they can use play as a tool to work through problems.   Toys for play are usually broken into four categories; social and fantasy, exploration and mastery materials, music,/art and movement and gross motor play.  Giving children experience with all of these types of toys helps children grow developmentally.  As schools move away from play, considering it less valuable as students leave preschool and kindergarten, I think we must remember that play can be a tool to further student learning.   

Module 3

     I read this week’s chapters in Life Smart and immediately began to think about all of the beautiful and unique faces in my classroom and the process that it took for each of them get here.  That process started well before they looked into their mother’s eyes.  It took a well cared for fetus and Mom to give them their bright eyes and functioning brains.  Mom not only had to make the decisive choice not to engage in risky behaviors prenatally, but also the special precautions that they should have made once baby was born. 

     I remember the choices that I made as a mother.  Much like my own mother, I believed that my health was synonymous with the health of my baby.  With those choices that I made, I still prayed every day for a healthy child.  In reading this weeks chapters that talked about the physical metamorphosis that the fetus goes through to make a healthy arrival into the world, I think that giving a baby a healthy home is something that every child should have.  I know young people who have been affected by the harmful effects of drugs, smoking and alcohol in utero.  It is so unfair that they should start their life’s journey at a disadvantage. 

     There are so many things that an unborn baby can be effected by without adding the effects of things that are within the mother’s control.  Anoxia is the term used when insufficient oxygen supply reaches the baby during labor.  The complications can derive from the umbilical cord, placenta or lungs, and can lead to death or brain damage.  The Rh factor is a type of protein located on the surface of red blood cells.  If the baby is Rh positive and the Mom is Rh negative, infants risk miscarriage or death after birth. 

     As we all know, those first few years of life go unremembered.  I always felt that this phenomenon was God’s way of letting parents make their mistakes without emotionally scarring children for life.  Infantile amnesia is the inability to remember events early in life.  Those precious brains that absorb and grow so much, won’t remember the time that they spent just a little too long in a wet diaper, or maybe even the depression that shown on their mothers face while they cried from colic.  Maybe when we think about Piaget’s theories on child development we can also think about how our children grow and reach milestones, we should also grow and reach milestones as parents.  As I look into my classroom and view all twenty-six of those faces, I know that each of their roads weren’t the same.  I know that some of those journeys were rocky, but I think God’s plan for us as parents, are to grow with our children and learn from our mistakes.

Module 2

     Of the many theorists who have studied and founded thoughts on the ways that humans develop, it is the findings of Vygotsky that most intrigue me.  Vygotsky believed the clues to understanding mental development lie in children’s social processes.  He identified dual paths to cognitive development, the elementary processes and psychological processes.  The heart of Vygotsky’s theory is the belief that elementary biological processes are transformed into higher psychological processes. For example, a biological process is to learn to speak but that process turns into a psychological process when those words are transformed into complete, meaningful sentences, when we formulate thoughts and ideas, or deduce and comprehend. 

     Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development locates the knowledge base that the child operates within, or the tasks that a child can do independently with the skills that the child will be capable of doing with the help of a parent, mentor or teacher.  This is a critical component to assuring that my students will benefit from the teaching that takes place in my classroom.  If we teach below the student’s mode of proximal development, there is not any real teaching taking place.  Students are able to complete these tasks independently.  If we teach to far above the zone of proximal development the material is well beyond concepts the student can understand.  I’m sure students rarely benefit from learning about how to calculate the axis of rotation of an angle in first grade, but we can begin to teach them about shapes, angles and symmetry.  Some may even benefit from learning basic principles of area.  I think that understanding the concepts of proximal development will be of great assistance in differentiating instruction for the classroom.

     Skinner’s principles on operant conditioning are extremely important to the educational realm.  Skinner believed that in order to understand behavior, we must look at the causes of an action and its consequences.  Skinner’s principles help us to understand how to reinforce behaviors, whether positive or negative, and how to encourage the wanted behaviors to continue.

     I think that as we explore the theories of these different intellectuals, we must understand the variety and unique personalities that we each possess. The behavior model that might fit one student or any human being, can certainly not meet the needs of the next.  In understanding that we can ensure that we are finding strategies that meet the needs of all.

Life Span Development

     Why do we do the things that we do?  Much of the course of our lives and the paths we inevitably choose to take can be attributed in part to biopsychosocial interactions.  These interactions are the components that act together to form our paths of development.  Our stage in development, environment and social interactions all attribute to the choices that we make.  Life span development is predicated on development being an interaction of biological, psychological and social environmental factors and processes.  This differs greatly from the epigenetic view of development, which poses that the ongoing interaction between heredity and environment influences our paths.

     In thinking about how we change as we age, it is important to evaluate how many of those changes are a result of our development and how much is a result of our social and environmental reactions.  How much have our thoughts and mannerisms changed from the time that we were kids?  Of course we’d like to think that we have vastly different beliefs and thoughts, but if we were self-centered children, and our environment tells us that this was acceptable, is it also likely that we will become self-centered adults.  Perhaps most self centered children will grow out of this stage of development once they leave adolescence, but if that behavior is nurtured it will likely grow and be fueled well into adulthood. 

     There are countless studies that try to define and explain our behaviors.  Many researchers believe that our development is discontinuous, meaning that there are clear indicators that serve as milestones to distinguish when we’ve reached certain points in our development.  Some researchers believe that we experience developmental continuity, or a slow progression of skills and changes throughout time.  I think an argument can be made for either.  I have a parent in one of my classes that sucks her thumb. Her son sucked his thumb in preschool last year, but has stopped sucking his thumb in kindergarten.  Should we say that the son has moved beyond the developmental stages of the mother, or has some environmental or behavioral factors encouraged the mother’s behavior?  As I explore how different factors change the person I am and how I behave, I think that I will use this time to be reflective about my own life and decisions.  I think the question that I will explore throughout this course is how have my own biopsychosocial interactions affected the person that I am today.