Piaget TIPR
Current Teacher Behaviors
1. What evidence do you see in your field experience of specific teacher behaviors that are related to Piaget's theory of cognitive development? Specifically address how the teacher introduces disequilibrium, aids in the process of adaptation (separate assimilation and accommodation, please), the stage(s) to which the teacher is gearing instruction, etc.
The most common thing I see in classes I've observed is the effort the teachers make to link the new information they are teaching to previous material they have already covered. This is an example of trying to help resolve the student's disequilibrium by assimilating the new material into schemas that already exist within the student's minds. Doing this helps them retain the information as well since they can relate to it something they already know and understand. At the same time, I occasionally saw teachers attempt to do that same assimilation approach when they saw students appear to be confused, yet try relate it to something that the students didn't remember or hadn't understood in the first place. Unfortunately this only made things worse and led to students feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. On the other hand, I feel that warning the students that new material was going to be presented helps them accommodate easier because it almost seemed to prepare them to have new schema ready since they might have never heard about the topics covered in depth about the meat packing industry during the Gilded Age, for example. I think teachers are usually gearing their instruction towards formal operation learners by expecting them to understand and process abstract concepts such as Capitalism or Socialism, but sometime forget that a more in-depth explanation in concrete chunks would be extremely helpful for less developed learners.
Student Needs
2. What are these students' needs through the lens of Piaget's theory? What more could or should be done?
While many, if not most, of these students are capable of the higher order thinking skills expected of those in the formal operation stage, I really think they benefit from concrete help sometimes. Maybe instead of telling them to find the four most important parts of a one page text, add a graphic organizer that helps guide them to the four topics you want them to address. Some of these students just aren't ready for that instruction and become overwhelmed leading them to disengage from the lesson, when they are perfectly capable of finding the points of discussion with a little guidance.
Plans for your Lesson
3. How will you address these needs when you teach your mini-lesson in this class?
I'd like to use concept maps throughout my teaching helping students see a visual representation of the material we can assimilate to what we already know, and create new bubbles for the concepts we need to accommodate into a different part. For my mini-lesson I'd use some of the vocab words to discuss other units that covered similar concepts, in an effort to anchor some of these new ideas to the background knowledge they already have. I'd also like to help them develop some of those formal operational skills like trying to hypothesize other possible solutions the actors could have used, or getting them to analyze the ethical and moral aspects of social issues.
1. What evidence do you see in your field experience of specific teacher behaviors that are related to Piaget's theory of cognitive development? Specifically address how the teacher introduces disequilibrium, aids in the process of adaptation (separate assimilation and accommodation, please), the stage(s) to which the teacher is gearing instruction, etc.
The most common thing I see in classes I've observed is the effort the teachers make to link the new information they are teaching to previous material they have already covered. This is an example of trying to help resolve the student's disequilibrium by assimilating the new material into schemas that already exist within the student's minds. Doing this helps them retain the information as well since they can relate to it something they already know and understand. At the same time, I occasionally saw teachers attempt to do that same assimilation approach when they saw students appear to be confused, yet try relate it to something that the students didn't remember or hadn't understood in the first place. Unfortunately this only made things worse and led to students feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. On the other hand, I feel that warning the students that new material was going to be presented helps them accommodate easier because it almost seemed to prepare them to have new schema ready since they might have never heard about the topics covered in depth about the meat packing industry during the Gilded Age, for example. I think teachers are usually gearing their instruction towards formal operation learners by expecting them to understand and process abstract concepts such as Capitalism or Socialism, but sometime forget that a more in-depth explanation in concrete chunks would be extremely helpful for less developed learners.
Student Needs
2. What are these students' needs through the lens of Piaget's theory? What more could or should be done?
While many, if not most, of these students are capable of the higher order thinking skills expected of those in the formal operation stage, I really think they benefit from concrete help sometimes. Maybe instead of telling them to find the four most important parts of a one page text, add a graphic organizer that helps guide them to the four topics you want them to address. Some of these students just aren't ready for that instruction and become overwhelmed leading them to disengage from the lesson, when they are perfectly capable of finding the points of discussion with a little guidance.
Plans for your Lesson
3. How will you address these needs when you teach your mini-lesson in this class?
I'd like to use concept maps throughout my teaching helping students see a visual representation of the material we can assimilate to what we already know, and create new bubbles for the concepts we need to accommodate into a different part. For my mini-lesson I'd use some of the vocab words to discuss other units that covered similar concepts, in an effort to anchor some of these new ideas to the background knowledge they already have. I'd also like to help them develop some of those formal operational skills like trying to hypothesize other possible solutions the actors could have used, or getting them to analyze the ethical and moral aspects of social issues.
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