Assignment 2—Students I - Dana Huff



Assignment 2—Students I

Dana Huff

danahuff@vt.edu

13 September 2008

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 ten-year-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

[pic]

[pic]

[pic]

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.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download