Piaget

Piaget was a very brilliant man for coming up and discovering his understanding of cognitive development.  His theory breaks down the developing of cognitive thoughts and actions into four different stages, sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational.  These different stages evolved into the next one as one grows up and the brain develops.  With everyone's brains changing and growing differently, there are no set ages for these stages, but it is still important to look at this and recognize what a student is able to process and understand at different stages in their lives.

In my observations this semester, this is something that I didn't even know I was looking at with each lesson.  I first want to show this video that my education psychology showed us while she covered this lesson on Piaget.  It is evidence of one of the stages, concrete operational, that shows that a student can recognize that the water levels in each cup may vary, but the amount of water doesn't.  Here is that brief video to watch.

I like this video because it shows the student is thinking through what she is seeing and expanding upon that.  Now take that knowledge and expand it further to abstract thoughts and you are reaching the next level, formal operational, which is where we want our students to be.  We want students to start thinking outside of the box to understand a concept.

The teacher that I am observing is teaching film studies for one of her classes.  They tend to watch a lot of movies to understand the time period and study the evolution of movies.  She hands out an assignment of the students to fill out while they watch the movie, like most teachers tend to do so students don't sleep or goof off.  However, rather than it just be busy work, at the end of the assignment is a space for the students to ask follow up questions or concerns about the movie or the time period that they wish to learn more about.  Then she will pick some of the good questions and next class ask them to the class to discuss as a class.  I really like this because to me, I see it reaching that abstract thinking and helps the students, who don't see that part of history in person, they are able to take what they see, think about it from that time periods perspective, and then ask even more questions to try and answer more questions about that time.

With the students asking these harder questions, it creates disequilibrium, an unease about the subject because it is new and the student doesn't know how to fit this new information into their schema.  Schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information.  By then having a classroom discussion, the teacher helps the students to assimilate the new information and helps the students come up with ideas and connections to accommodate the information into their schema.  It really is fascinating.

If you are still struggling to understand what this final stage is talking about, the formal operational, here is a youtube video that I found to be very helpful!