This week we focused on developmental theory. Please write a post about how studying theory can inform your practice as an educator or professional.
In class, we were studying the different educational theories by Jean Piaget (Cognitive Development), Lawrence Kohlberg (Moral Development), and Robert Selman (Perspective Taking). By studying theory of cognitive development, it can really help me to understand my futures students on a deeper level. By knowing what each stage, level, and perspective looks like, it can help me to structure an appropriate age-level lesson plan. For example, teaching a middle school lesson plan would look different from a high school plan and then also from a college level plan. The theories will allow me to notice certain patterns in students and allow me to guide them in my classroom more efficiently. I will be able to help them build upon their already known knowledge to more difficult and abstract problems.
An example of this in a computer science classroom is taking abstract and conceptual concepts and explaining them in a more concrete and tangible way. I’ve been able to learn about concepts then teach them to college students who never learned the inner workings of a computer before, by doing this very thing. I do this by drawing pictures of the concept I’m explaining to make it visual and tangible to talk about and more understandable. I employ this method more often when I talk to the introductory class students than the intermediate class students. This is because the intermediate class students have a solid foundation of what a lot of the conceptual ideas are already and have other problems with more advanced structures. I still draw pictures for those new things because the topics are still very abstract. Although, I can do it way less and explain more with words. These students are roughly the same ages, but their skills levels for computer science are already drastically different. This shows how the cognitive development (in the formal operational state) of college students allows them to work on more abstract problems and hypothetically grasp those concepts easier than in other age levels.
Another example of personal experience with cognitive development and computer science, is when I ran a club for coding while I was on the 21c staff for the YMCA. The 3rd graders I was working with were using code.org and scratch.mit.edu in order to use block code to solve different puzzles and create different games. Even though they have to use a different type of code and a website to help guide them in order to understand how coding works, a lot of them were creating games and solving those puzzles. This is an excellent example of how to engage kids with abstract concepts with very tangible examples. They use these blocks that have underlying real code to them in order to convey what the block does on the screen. Code.org also uses themes that kids are pretty interested in as well. Here is a screenshot of one of the puzzles:
This would move the character forward, and there are videos explaining these things as well. There are also game like programs as well, like the superstar program of the club: DANCE PARTY! Which basically went through block code to play audio, change audio, and make your characters move in specific ways using specific buttons. Here is what that program looks like:
They even use a button in order to show the “text” code:
Using this sort of approach for elementary students will work for their cognitive stage because the concepts they are learning are very concrete and tangible. This allows kids to grasp the concepts of logic of code long before they even begin to decipher what text code looks like and how it’s used. This is how I started to learn code in 4th grade (not through code.org but through scratch.mit.edu which is less hold-handy and more for game creating but very much the same thing), and it truly helped me later on with the concepts I’m learning now. I also saw some pretty advanced games from me and from others for our level of cognitive development. Here are some examples of some of my projects:
Even through these low quality gifs, you can clearly see the logic and intelligence that these methods provide enough scaffolding for elementary level students to learn at their cognitive stage.
