Key application: influences on education
You need to apply the theories from the cognitive-developmental
approach to education for example the introduction of child-centred learning,
scaffolding and the spiral curriculum. |
Think about
how you have been taught in primary and secondary school. You have probably
experienced a range of teaching styles. The styles employed
have been profoundly influenced by cognitive-developmental psychology – particularly
by the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky. Before the 1960’s teaching methods
in the Britain were profoundly influenced by behaviourist psychology. The
behaviourists favoured a transmission model
of education. This involves giving a range of knowledge and skills by direct
instruction. Direct instruction means a teacher delivering material to children
by talking and writing and dictating notes. Children were seen as passive
recipients of knowledge. Little effort was made to understand what children
were taught to what they were capable of understanding.
However by the 1960’s and 1980’s the work of Piaget and Vygotsky
was becoming very influential in both psychology and education, and progressive,
child centered models of learning began to appear.
The Plowden
report of 1967 recommended a shift from traditional teaching to more progressive
styles
of teaching. The report highlighted 3 things;
1. Children need to be given individual attention and cannot all be treated
the same way.
2. They shouldn’t be taught things until they are developed enough
intellectually to cope with them.
3. Children mature intellectually, physically and emotionally at very different
rates.
Discovery learning (Piaget)
• The
child needs the materials and then can discover
things The
teacher must |
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Child-centred learning (Piaget)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
|
Reciprocal teaching (Vygotsky)
Palincsar
and Brown developed in 1984 to help children decode written material
and understand it – the teacher and a small group reads, the group
leader summarises the content, the group either agrees or re-read and discuss
again. Important skills are asking questions, summarising and clarifiying. |
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Collaborative learning (Vygotsky)
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• Teachers should guide, extend and challenge. • Means that those who do know can help those who do not. • Co-operation rather than competition • Foot (1994) suggests that collaborative learning can help older children too |
Scaffolding – based on Vygostsky’s ideas about cognitive development.
www.glenorchy.tased.edu.au/.../scaffolding.htm
| Scaffolding
is that help which will enable a learner to accomplish a task that
they would not have been quite able to manage on their own, and it
is help which is intended to bring the learner closer to a state of
competence which will enable them eventually to complete such a task
on their own. Whoever is taking the role of the tutor for the child is said to be providing scaffolding for them. This can be a teacher, or a peer. It just has to be someone who knows more than the child. The scaffolding is the context that allows the child to achieve whatever they want or solve the problem. Without this scaffolding the children is unable to learn. ‘Scaffolding’ suggests that the structure can be taken away. As the child gets more competent, the tutor can withdraw support gradually until the problem is solved or the skill is achieved.The metaphor of scaffolding is used to illustrate the need to provide temporary supporting structures that help learners to develop new understandings, new concepts and abilities. As the learner develops control of these, support is withdrawn. |
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Wertsch (1980) suggests that if Vygotsky’s ideas are correct then
any new skill should be done socially first, then individually. This was
tested
and found to support this idea.
The spiral curriculum ( Bruner)
 |
A
spiral curriculum is where a wide number of topics are taught in
the early grades. The topics are cycled throughout the years, developing
deeper understanding through the later grades. In 1960, Bruner proposed a “spiral curriculum” concept to facilitate structuring a curriculum ´around the great issues, principles, and values that a society deems worthy of the continual concern of its members´ (Bruner, 1960). The next decades many school system educators attempted to implement this concept into their curriculum. Bruner (1975) described the principles behind the spiral curriculum in the following way:
”…I was struck by the fact that successful efforts to teach highly structured bodies of knowledge like mathematics, physical sciences, and even the field of history often took the form of metaphoric spiral in which at some simple level a set of ideas or operations were introduced in a rather intuitive way and, once mastered in that spirit, were then revisited and reconstrued in a more formal or operational way, then being connected with other knowledge, the mastery at this stage then being carried one step higher to a new level of formal or operational rigour and to a broader level of abstraction and comprehensiveness. The end stage of this process was eventual mastery of the connexity and structure of a large body of knowledge” |
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