I have found Erikson’s Psychosocial Development and Piaget’s
Cognitive development approach as most meaningful in my understanding of how children
learn and develop. Erikson anchors a
child’s moral judgment in his growth in resolving basic crisis during certain
periods of his biological development.
A “normal” child goes through stages below, set along with
Piaget’s Cognitive Development approach sees growth of a person as both an
event happening outside and inside the child.
As his biology or physique grows, the relationships and the mind also
develop. Recently, there have been
studies about the development of generations, from the baby boomers to
generation Z. Looking at the different
generations of humanity right now, I am often overwhelmed and perplexed at the
generational differences brought about by the dynamic change in our culture,
more specifically, the influence of technology in our growth and learning. Much of the generational differences though
would, I believe, redound to how our brains process information, our exposure
to technology and how it impacts our lives.
Despite the generational differences, which I believe are
real and varied, the fundamental stages still should serve as framework for
understanding growth of persons and teaching developmentally. The generational differences do not alter the
stages of psychosocial and cognitive development which makes, more than ever,
Erikson and Piaget, as relevant, and to me, more appealing in their learning
theories. The newest generation,
despite its disparity in characteristics to, say, the baby boomers, will
definitely follow the same stages proposed by Erickson and Piaget.
Developmental/ Biological
age
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Erikson’s Stages of
Psychosocial Development
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Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive
development
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Connections/Insights on
the present generations
|
0
– 18 mos.
Infancy
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Trust vs. Mistrust
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Sensorimotor
0 – 2yrs
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Gen ?. The next generations growing in the middle of the 21st
century will certainly have a different world and education. A glimpse of their world now points to
technology such as Augmented Reality and String Theory. I wonder what this gen’s learning style
would be like. Certainly their brains
are wired differently. Security and
confidence for this generation could only be enhanced by technology
integration in their learning.
|
-sense of security and assurance is important
|
|||
18mos./2yrs
– 3yrs
Early
Childhood
|
Autonomy vs. Shame/ Doubt
|
||
-sense of confidence and independence in functional skills
|
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3
– 5 yrs
Preschool
|
Initiative vs. Guilt
|
Preoperational
2 – 7 yrs
Concrete Operational
7 – 11 yrs
|
Gen Z. Born after 1990 and introduced to the graphical web. Amateurs internet searchers lacking skills
in evaluating web content.
These kids were the first
born with the Internet and are suspected to be the most individualistic and
technology-dependent generation. Sometimes referred to as the iGeneration.
These pre- and elementary
schoolers at present do miss out on concrete learning if all exposures are
virtual.
|
-exploration and sense of control of factors in
environment to accomplish tasks
|
|||
5
– 11 yrs
School
age
|
Industry vs. Inferiority
|
||
-sense of competence to accomplish is important, e.i. to
make things and make things together
|
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12
– 18 yrs.
Adoslescence
|
Identity vs. Confusion
|
Formal Operational (Adolescence – Adulthood)
11 yrs up
|
Gen Y. Millennials. Born 1980-2000 (Age 14-34). They experienced the rise of the Internet,
9/11 and the wars that followed.
Because of their dependence on technology, they are said to be entitled
and narcissistic.
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-sense of individual identity in the midst of a group
(fitting-in) as primarily important
|
|||
19
– 40 yrs
Young
Adulthood
|
Intimacy vs. Isolation
|
Gen X.
Born
1965-1979 (Age 35-49)
They
were originally called the baby busters because fertility rates fell after
the boomers. As teenagers, they experienced the AIDs epidemic and the fall of
the Berlin Wall. Sometimes called the MTV Generation, the "X" in
their name refers to this generation's desire not to be defined.
|
|
-value for relationships
|
|||
40
– 65 yrs
Middle
Adulthood
|
Generativity vs. Stagnation
|
Baby Boomers.
Born 1943-1964, the
boomers were born during an economic and baby boom following World War II.
These hippie kids protested against the Vietnam War and participated in the civil
rights movement in the west, all with rock 'n' roll music blaring in the
background.
In our society, they are now the main force
of leadership in our institutions – business, politics, culture and
education. Most of them have the
resources and influence over others.
|
|
-a sense of legacy
|
|||
65
yrs – death
Maturity
|
Ego Integrity vs. Despair
|
||
-sense of fulfillment
|
I belong to Gen X and within the later phase of Piaget’s
Formal-Operational Cognitive development period and currently dealing with
issues of Intimacy if by Erikson’s Psychosocial development yet I deal with
different generations in their varying periods.
I deal with students who are Gen Ys working on their psychosocial
Identity who are in their early phase of Formal-Operational Cognition. For the most part though, I deal with
teachers who are either Gen Xs (majority of them) or Baby Boomers (our veterans
and guardians). Reflective administration entails understanding well the
contexts of the people I work with, work for and those I lead.
On a sidelight, at home, I have Gen Zs who demand attention
and wit too.
Genuine learning, I believe, happens when there is
understanding, the ultimate objective of teaching. Understanding however has to be manifest on
the side of the learners, this has to be seen or evident. When I see students demonstrating mastery of (a)
skill/s, demonstrate confidence in delivery of this skill or ability, execute
accurately a concept, skill or task, I can say there is learning that takes
place. However, not all learnings can be
exhibited immediately, some learned skills or concepts come later in the year
or even later in life.
I had a privilege of working as a prefect of discipline in
the past before becoming an administrator.
From my observations, learning a value is not immediate. The change I hope for in the student or
students come later in either a similar situation he is faced with again or
even after school, I mean, after high school when they come back and tell me,
sir, I realized, learned or appreciated this from you or from what you taught,
albeit the teaching happened informally and not in the formal setting of the
classroom.
Psychology plays a crucial role for education. By analogy,
psychology is to teaching as anatomy is to medicine.
An approach cannot work for a long term unless anchored on
a principle of how children learn.
People have a natural disposition to learn, it is in our
nature to explore. Human babies are born
with an innate desire to know the world around them and are relentless with curiosity
to explore them. The need to know is
like a drive, an urge like hunger or thirst that need to be satisfied. According to Dr. Medina, which most recent
researches also assert, babies are preloaded with software that upon birth
activates to satisfy the need to know. It’s not anymore the tabula rassa view of a
learner.
All throughout life,
we do not seem to outgrow the thirst for knowledge. According to Dr. John Medina, researchers
have already shown that even the adult brain stays malleable like a baby’s
brain, and so, as adults, we can grow new connections, strengthen existing ones
and even create new neurons allowing us all to be lifelong learners. If children are allowed to remain curious,
they will continue to deploy the natural tendencies to discover and explore.
Piaget’s approach of schema and disequilibrium are
important concepts for me. That as
persons, as learners, we categorize our sensory information in order for us to
attain a sense of equilibrium, a sort of sense of stable-zone in our
brains. But when an issue or doubt is
set in, we find ways to adapt the information into our schema if not, change
schemas to adapt to the change of equilibrium.
It seems to me that it connects to this inherent desire in
us to be curious. Curiosity stems from
this sense of urge to seek equilibrium in our schemas. But because the real world is dynamic, always
interplaying, our exposure to the real world – real people, relations and
animate and inanimate surroundings - always shakes our schema which prompts us
to seek answers to attain an equilibrium.
In the classroom, the importance of the art of questioning
which triggers curiosity of students or “shakes” or in a sense intrigues their
schema is very important such that knowledge or subject content facilitated to
them is dealt like thirst being quenched.
A healthy learner has to have a flexible schema, which is
attained through varied exposures. In
this way, the fixed schema disposition of a child or learner is avoided where
parang bigot, or at worst, contented or stagnating mind na tayo. A student or child who does not learn falls
into a fixed schema condition.
I think here in this Piagetian concept, it underlies as
well the importance of theory testing among high school students. For Piaget, this is the formal stage of
cognitive development where students can tackle less concrete information, the
abstract knowledge or the possibilities given the realities. Meaningful learning especially for students
at this stage need testing in real experience and not just in theoretical
contexts. In the context of Vygotsky
saying that the learners must individually transform complex information to
make it their own, the need to interact with people and the world becomes even
more important.
Implications to learning would be that children should be
consistently exposed to the real world or should be consistently exposed to
people who operate the real-world.
TEACHERS
and TEACHING
However, on teachers naman, they are not homogeneous in
their interest to learn and in fact are not always wanting to learn even if the
students they teach are dynamic individuals produced by their dynamic times.
Developmentally appropriate teaching means that the
teachers’ method adapts to the developmental period of the students, catering
to needs appropriate during the period of the child and that the teachers
understands what it takes to do so.
Working in a Jesuit school, I have come to understand that
we proceed from a certain charism, if you call it, in our way of facilitating
learning. This way of proceeding is
called the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm or the IPP, a way of teaching and
formation patterned after the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. In the IPP, as in the Spiritual Exercises,
the importance of reflection is central.
Because “Jesuit spirituality is a spirituality of choice, and it is
natural for Jesuits to be both non-coercive and nondirective in assisting the
young with their decision-making challenges without in any way just leaving the
decision-maker to his or her own inexperience, fears, and impulses” (Ignatian
Pedagogy).
The framework in the next page, to me, presents in brief
the relation ship of the learning core (teacher-student-content) as akin to the
relationship between the retreatant-retreat director and God. What nourishes learning in this triangle of
the learning core is the interplay of the process of
Experience-Reflection-Action.
To me, there are certain aspects of
the paradigm that sound like abstract, but I come to realize that much of its
aspects are now confirmed or affirmed by research and educational practice.
The emphasis on Experience and Reflection, for instance,
parallels with Information Processing Model where it posits that a strength of
a lesson is on how much of it goes into the long term memory. From stimulus, all lessons do not however
proceed directly to long term memory, as much of it will be lost to either
decay or some going into the short-term and working memory. Some “experience” about the lesson should be
undergone by the learner for the lesson to be more effectively committed to
long term memory. Repetitions, which I
believe, is essentially the cycle of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm - the
Experience-Reflection-Action process - helps to commit lessons or content or
truth for that matter, into the long term memory of the learner.
I am a believer of the Ignatian Paradigm. Albeit at the moment, I struggle very much
with it, but my readings in neuroscience, learning processes and the brain as
well as on assessments further affirm my faith in the importance of the
interplay of Experience-Reflection-Action in the learning process.
Most of the classrooms I visit and the teachers I see now
in school do a lot of front-loading, e.i., the traditional input & “download” via, mainly, the lecture or “banking” (depositing information into the
students head) then testing or assessment in the traditional way.
I pretty much want to enhance the E-R-A cycles in our
teachers and in our teaching but I don’t seem to be able to do so. I get lost often and end up continuing what
has been continually done by our teachers.
I grope for an effective approach on raising the level of impact our
teachers make on our students through their lessons.
In our curriculum frameworks, we have articulated that it
should be along Ignatian Paradigm albeit UBDized (based on the 3-stage lesson
format starting with goals & evidence of learning as the first step), as we
usually call it, but I don’t seem to concretely see this unfolding in the many
teaching sessions I observe.
Another difficulty I encounter in
the IPP is that we currently do not have an instrument to evaluate its
implementation, for us to know exactly the degree if it is implemented and what
are its concrete results in the growth of the students (the effectiveness of
it). I feel that these are difficult to
measure since assessments schemes we have focus mainly on the content that our
students earn but the change of a student or students from point A to point B
of their learning seems abstract for measuring.
The evaluation of the implementation of the IPP is an area
of interest for me to research about.
However, I am honestly facing more blank walls now than answers as to
the hows and means of proceeding with this study. The topic seems too broad but I believe that
Erikson, Piaget and St. Ignatius have much in common in their understanding of
how effective learning takes place or is achieved.
REFLECTIVE ADMINISTRATOR
Essential to the work of a school leader is the crafting of
decisions on three general matters of the school – school leadership which
involves the creation, essentially, of structures and directions; instructional
leadership which is the core of an administrator’s work and school management,
the daily operations which often bites the bulk of the leader’s time and tasks.
Reflectiveness which stands on the skill of discernment, e.i.,
being able to read the patterns, the connections, “the movement of the spirit”
so to say in the events, activities, movements and flow of the school, to make
it in tune to its raison d ‘etre (vision and mission), when embraced and
exercised well by an administrator will
direct his or her decisions on how to interplay well the three functions
of structure, instruction and management.
My own weakness is that I get so engrossed with matters of
management most of the time and the work of creatively setting up or supporting
or reexamining structures to foster growth for our students and teachers, I
fail to work on well. Instruction is a
core competence I grope so much about, and it does not help my exercise of
leadership as acting principal.
Add this situation to the barb of people-handling, mostly
reforming naggers and complainers in our team, that I need to do,
administration becomes a huge burden.
Nonetheless, it is a relief to understand that part of the
beauty of reflection and discernment is that I am able to see myself in the
midst of the tasks I do and read the patterns or movements as-I-go to find out
where these lead me. This is a
discipline, I admit, so difficult to sustain such that I, so often, don't
observe it. When I discern on matters
that need my decision, I consider an activity or a matter whether it belongs to
the cluster of school leadership, instructional leadership or management, from
which, depending on the priority by importance, I weigh the dilemma then make a
stand. More often though, school
management issues or tasks which often require less visioning, grab the most
attention.
If I am only better able to look at the choices I make and
align these with the goals of my role as leader, as acting principal, as
lay-formator working with the Jesuits – I could confidently say that I have
done the core of my leadership discernment.
If I am better able as well to articulate my choices, enjoin many to
support it and foster growth-mindset in our team, I could probably say I am
doing okay in leadership.
However, these are my continuing struggles. My assurance though is that the result that
challenging experiences and reflection produce is a better individual in the
end.
Some
References I used:
Medina, John, Brain Rules, Pear Press 2008.
Geck, Caroline, The Newest Net Generation, 2014.
http://www.ignatianspirituality.com/ignatian-voices/education-arts-and-sciences/why-jesuits-are-in-secondary-education/#sthash.UjGBKvmy.dpuf
Ignatian Pedagogy, A Practical Approach.
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