June 4, 2012

Tonight in class we did a role playing activity in which we will learn about various theorists which we will be studying this semester.  Students were handed a mini bio and had to role play the various people.  People who were discussed included: Gilligan, Kohlberg, Piaget, Skinner and Vygotsky.  It just so happens that Chomsky was on a dinner date.  All people had various levels of learning and processing and differing thoughts about each.

Next we looked at the idea about how exercise can jog the memory.  The idea is to see if this is a good research paper.  We looked at some slides which discussed what to look for in a proper research paper. 

After break, we all enjoyed the jaywalking experiment (i.e. the Hawthorne Effect). 

Next we looked at the idea of language.  It seems as if there was quite some controversy about the research behind language acquisition. 

And then what a cute little girl singing to us demonstrating language as Piaget described it.  The video showed the various ways children acquire language from birth on. 

We then looked at a slide show describing Piaget’s 4 stages of development.  He was the first person to use describe the idea of schemes/schemata. 

From tonight’s class, we should take away the general ideas which were presented by the different theorists.  In particular, we spent more time on Piaget.  He believed in the four stages of learning.

1.      Sensorimotor

2.      Preoperational

3.      Concrete Operational

4.      Post-operational

He was a genetic epistemologist.  Piaget believed in the process of assimilation and accommodation.  He was a developmental psychologist.  The criticism are that he was too clinical and it would be difficult to apply this cross-cultures.  An implication for teaching would be that it is difficult for a kid to understand sarcasm.  It also might be an idea that if something is too abstract, to take it a step back and make it more concrete.  Another idea is that maybe you can work towards bringing up the level of thinking while working with students.  It is also important for the idea behind using manipulative.  Another implication would be the idea of rearranging the classroom to meet the developmental stages.

This is  video about Piaget's stages of development.

And this is for Kevin (aka Skinner) and all of you other ABA people out there.
TABLE TIME!!!!!