Educational Principles Essay

Jean Piaget’s theories continue to have a major impact on both teacher training and classroom practices. This essay will discuss the three educational principles derived from his theory and also discuss the limitations of preoperational thought from his point of view. The first educational principle is discovery learning. In this principle, children are encouraged to discover things for themselves by interacting with the environment (Berk, 2010). Teachers provide them with things that will promote development thru their imagination and exploration. By providing a variety of materials like art supplies, books, building blocks, musical instruments and more, teachers are offering opportunities to widen their creativity and enhance their learning (Berk, 2010). Through their exploring and thinking students are taking on an active role in their learning and knowledge building. According to Castronova (n. d), â€Å"Piaget was the first to show that children were not â€Å"empty vessels† to be filled with knowledge, but active builders of knowledge. With our current access to so much on the internet and through technology, there are many more opportunities for teachers to introduce children to discovery learning. Another principle is sensitivity to children’s readiness to learn. In this theory, teachers introduce new activities that build on their current skills while challenging their incorrect ways and allowing them to practice those new skills. They do not push them before they are ready (Berk, 2010). It is ok to allow children to experiment and search out answers for themselves. Teachers should assess and identify a child’s strengths and weaknesses. This is where Piaget saw the teachers as facilitators and there to guide the students (Ginn, n. d). Children need to make mistakes and be able to learn from them. The third educational principle is the acceptance of individual differences. Piaget’s theory assumes that children develop at different rates, but in the same sequence, so teachers must plan activities for small groups and individuals (Berk, 2010). This theory’s implication is that instruction should be adapted to the development level of the learner and that the content is consistent with that level of learning (Piaget, n. . ). A child needs to be compared to their own previous level of development. The limitations of preoperational thought from Piaget’s point of view are described by him as what they can’t understand (Berk, 2010). The term preoperational suggests that he compared them to older, more competent children (Berk, 2010). One of these limitations is egocentrism. Piaget assumes that the egocentric child assumes that other people see, feel, and hear exactly the same way that they do (Berk, 2010). This is responsible for animistic thinking that inanimate objects have lifelike qualities (Berk, 2010). Children also have the inability to conserve. That is, something stays the same in quantity even though it’s appearance changes. For example, two children have identical boxes of raisins, but when child 1 spreads their raisins on the table, child 2 is convinced that they have more (Berk, 2010). Preoperational children also have the inability to reverse steps. They can’t mentally go through steps in a problem and reverse direction to the starting point (Berk, 2010). Lastly, they have difficulty with hierarchical classification. This is the inability to organize objects into classes and subclasses based on their differences and similarities (Berk, 2010). In conclusion, according to McLeod (2010), Piaget drew a number of conclusions about the limitations of preoperational thought: (1) Understanding of these situations is ‘perception bound’. Child is drawn by changes in the appearance of the materials to conclude that a change has occurred. (2) Thinking is ‘centered’ on one aspect of the situation.  Child notices change in level of water or in length of clay without noticing that other aspects of the situation have changed simultaneously. (3) Thinking is focused on states rather than on transformations. Child fails to track what has happened to the materials and simply makes an intuitive judgment based on how they appear ‘now’. (4) Thinking is ‘irreversible’ in that the child cannot appreciate that a reverse transformation would return the material to its original state. Reversibility is a crucial aspect of the logical (operational) thought of later stages.