Child development

Another activity we made was to read an article about child development. Child development is all the changes that occur on a child’s life until adolescence. Humans change over the time because this is something natural. These changes happen due to many factors, for example a child is influenced by his family, his friends, his school and also by his culture and his society. Children mature over the time and they improve their knowledge and abilities. All educators need to be knowledgeable about children development because they have to know what methods they have to use to teach them. They also have to know each child individually in order to help them if they had some problems. So we, as future teachers, have to be conscious of the importance and influences that we have on a child ideas and on his development.

The article also presented some theorists  and their approaches to child development, some of them see it as a largely individual (like Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner or Sigmund Freud)  and some others were concerned more with the influences of society, history culture and context (like Lev Vygotsky, Barbara Rogoff, or Loris Malaguzzi).

Last issue of the article was about ‘sustained shared thinking’.  The learning that took place between a pair of learner and adult is called ‘sustained share thinking’ in which also the adult is able to help the child to take the next step in learning. Teachers have to pay attention to the behave and the feelings of students and encourage them to improve. We also have to know that we can learn from children (they know more about technologies for example), so it is a process in which each one learn from the other.

Finally in the last class we were talking about some methods of learning. There are three: behaviourism, constructivism and socio-constructivism.

- Behaviourism: we learn by following someone (teachers, parents, friends), in a class the figure of the teacher is the one who guides the group.

- Constructivism: we construct new knowledge through previous knowledge.

- Socio-constructivism: we build knowledge in community with interactions between the learner and others. The teacher helps and guides students to improve their knowledge with the ‘zone of proximal development’ (ZPD) and also he has the role of stimulating students.