Module 1

     Last year I spent time as a classroom assistant in preschool.  I could not wait for the opportunity to work with the smallest and by far the cutest kids in the school.  When I walked in the classroom on the first day of school while they were indeed the most adorable kids that I’d ever seen gathered in one place,  we clearly spoke two different languages.  When I told them that, ‘we were on silent,’ five little voices asked me what silence meant.  When I told them to, ‘make a circle on the rug,’ there were several small children that stood frozen completely confused by my direction.  I realized very quickly what the words, developmentally appropriate meant.  In visiting Piaget’s four stages of development I thought about how important knowing what is developmentally appropriate for our students is.  In the preoperational stage of development when students are developing language and using symbols to represent objects, spouting words that are unfamiliar to them will be extremely unproductive.  It would be helpful to know that telling your classroom of four year olds that they will be going on a field trip in three weeks will result in your students asking you daily for fifteen days, “is today the day we’re going to the zoo?” 

     Adversely, I think we must be wary of underestimating a child’s abilities, solely based on their developmental levels.  As my year in preschool progressed, I watched students learn and grow.  Parents were often amazed by what they saw their 4 year olds doing in class.  Students could pour their milk into a cup, open bags of graham crackers and clean up their lunch trays after a meal.  Students would learn how to count one to one, recognize alphabets and their sounds and many were even reading by the end of the year.  Parents would often wonder how they knew what to do at school and often could not achieve the same results at home.    Environment, routine and expectation were all factors that attributed to their success. 

     Teaching is a balance of constructing, balancing and conveying knowledge in a way that is ‘just right’ for our intended students.  In reading chapter two of Anita Woolfolks, Educational Psychology (Woolfolk 61), it states,” Students must be neither bored by work that is too simple nor left behind by teaching they cannot understand.”  Woolfolk references Hunt in saying that, “disequilibrium must be kept “just right” to encourage growth.”  Just as parents and teachers many times enable students by setting low expectations, you cannot expect to set the bar so high and outside of the student’s realm of understanding that it is not requiring any real thinking or growth.  Looking back on that preschool class we often had parents who expected that their students would be performing simple equations by the end of the year.  We had parents who swore that they had taught their four year olds multiplication and division.  Although that student may or may not have been able to memorize the words, they did not comprehend the process that it took to really know the material.  It is much more feasible that we teach kids in preschool to count one to one and maybe even teach students how to make groups of numbers and objects. 

     The psychological development of our students will vary.  As teachers we need to know how to nurture that process so that we are allowing them to think critically, understand and explain the processes that they are learning and challenging themselves to further their understandings.