How Do I Teach My Students?

Many teachers think school activities should be matched to student's abilitities, they should be neither too difficult nor too easy, given the student's current state of development. The idea is that a student's thinking goes through stages, and each stage is characterized by a particular way of understanding the world. So if teachers know and understand that sequence, they can plan their lessons in accordance with how their students think.

There is a development sequence from birth through adolescence, but pinpointing where a particular child is in that sequence and tuning your instruction to that child's cognitive capabilities is not realistic.

Teachers must learn to recognize that no content is inherently developmentally inappropriate. If teachers accept that students' failure to understand is not a matter of content, but either of presentation or a lack of background knowledge, then the natural extention is that no content should be off limits for school-age children.

As teachers, you must also consider the cost if students do not fully understand a concept the way you had intended. The cost may be minimal, and the content may be worth knowing, even if in an incomplete way. For example, suppose your preschool students have learned about Martin Luther King Jr., but you are having a hard time getting them to understand that he was a real person who is no longer here, and that the fictional characters such as Mary Poppins are not here and never were.

If it's hard for a 4-year-old to conceive of people living in different times and places, does that mean that history should not be taught until the child is older? Such an argument would not make much sense to a developmental psychologist. For both children and adults, understanding of any new concept is inevitably incomplete. The preschoolers can still learnsomething about who King was and what he stood for. Their mistaken belief that they might encounter him at a local store, or that he lives at a school that bears his name, will be corrected in time. Indeed, how do children learn that some people are fictional and some are not? Not by a magical process of brain maturation.

Children learn this principle as they learn any other, sometimes showing that they understand and other times not. If you wait until you are certain that the children will understand every nuance of a lesson, you will likely wait too long to present it. If they understand every nuance, you're probably presenting content that they've already learned elsewhere.

It turns out that our perceptions about what students know depend on the task we use to probe their knowledge.

Reference:

Bruner, J. 1960. The process of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.