Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky’s name is synonymous with social constructivist theory and the term “zone of proximal development”. When learners interact with other more accomplished learners, a metaphorical scaffold can be built from current knowledge to a height just above where current knowledge stops and new learning can take place. Learners are dragged upward “through cognitive conflict and social negotiation” like a high-rise building under construction adding a floor (Fetherston 2006 p. 159). Vygotsky was interested in the effect of a learning tool on learning behaviour and anticipated the impact of computers in education. The tool “does not just facilitate thinking but fundamentally alters and shapes it” (Fetherstone).
Social constructivism dominates contemporary educational theory, and has done so for some time. In the classroom, this means the prominence of group work where the teacher is seen as a facilitator rather than a “sage on the stage”. In a classroom where students work on dedicated notebook computers with the room arranged in desk clusters, this group approach can become the natural basis of learning. However, lately educators have come to see the impracticality of group work when over-used (Finn, C. & Ravitch, D. 1996). A great deal of time is taken to make progress and teachers’ expertise may be under-utilised and under-valued. In Music, the shortcomings of the approach are obvious. The master/student relationship is not bettered by the notion of many students with imperfect skills teaching one another to achieve mastery where they each individually do not exhibit mastery. The modern fear of the word “teacher” and its replacement by “facilitator” is probably the world’s reaction against authoritarianism after two world wars.
Jean Piaget
Piaget proposes a theory of human cognitive development that occurs in stages. The stages are as follow (Sprinthall and Sprintall 1981 p.107):
Age/ Stage
0 - 2 Sensorimotor
2 - 7 Intuitive or preoperational
7 - 11 Concrete operations
11 - 16 Formal operations
While children will vary in the exact ages they metamorphose through these stages, the stages are sequential and can allow no stage skipping.
Piaget claimed that his theory was based on careful observation and thus had empirical validity, however, critics argue that his sample of children observed was too small. The most famous of those observed were his own children. Answers could have been predicted by the questions asked of the children and by the body language and nuances of a person so familiar to the children. This could be particularly the case when Piaget asked a child whether a long skinny beaker held more liquid than a wide squat beaker – both beakers in fact holding the same volume of liquid. Different questions were asked of different children rather than through a standardised approach.
Piagetian educational theory tries to ensure that teachers do not try to teach children something before they are ready because the learning will be partial and the teaching ineffective. However, Piagetian theory could limit what is taught and might fly in the face of the common man’s wonder at just what children can do that adults cannot. This is true of language acquisition and especially musical instrument mastery. Young Suzuki method violinists acquire rapid skills. Piaget’s theories could result in an English teacher feeling that younger students cannot “do” Shakespeare.
Jerome Buner
Bruner is a cognitivist in that his understanding of learning theory is based on the research into how people learn and how the brain works. Soon after WWII, he postulated that people “make meaning out of their perceptions by making them consistent with past experiences” (Sprinthall and Sprinthall p.280). This is a type of self-imposed scaffolding whereby Bruner sees people filtering new experience through the knowledge they already hold. As they reject new experience, edit it, or accept it, they cannot help but modify bit by bit what they know as experience allows (Sprinthall and Sprinthall p.93). Thus, a variety of stimuli during growing up is important to the development of intelligence since dealing with change and novelty forces people to shift knowledge paradigms. This would explain why city children can seem brighter than country children because the diurnal and seasonal routine of rural tasks encourages sameness as does mixing with an homogeneous, familiar and small local population. Rural children can lack the variety of stimuli and mental challenges that proliferate in the city.
Bruner differs from Piaget in that he believes that children are able to learn anything so long as instruction is appropriately designed (Wikipedia 2007). This is more liberating for teachers while also providing a greater challenge. Teachers cannot hide behind the “no can do” limits of Piaget’s stages.
John Hattie
John Hattie is an academic currently working in New Zealand. He is interested in the most important factors determining variance in student achievement, and he establishes the key factors as the students themselves (50% impact on achievement) and teachers (30% impact). The effects of home, schools, principals and peers are much weaker. He then turns his attention to teacher training because teaching methodology is obviously more readily malleable than the students themselves. He sees teacher improvement possible by targeting teacher training and professional development at the attributes of teacher excellence. However, the “attributes of excellence” in teaching need to be established by careful research (Hattie 2003).
To establish the key qualities of excellent teachers, Hattie reviews the research literature and conducts his own research. He compares the difference between expert teachers and experienced teachers. He finds that expert teachers expect a great deal from their students (a high level of intellectual challenge), are more effective in representing knowledge in ways accessible to students, and provide substantial assessment monitoring and feedback (p.15).
However, Hattie only confirms what teachers and students have long known: that excellent teachers are able to explain things clearly, raise the bar of expectations for their students, and then spend a great deal of time marking.
William Glasser
I first came across William Glasser in 1986 when I started teaching at Emanuel School in Randwick. The American Headmaster wanted a freer school with a negotiated curriculum and a discipline that was not a “system”. Glasser was behind this thinking. Glasser asks us to see ourselves existentially in control of our own behaviour. Dominated by needs to survive, to belong, to be empowered, to be free and to have fun, people behave according to their dominant need at any particular time. Glasser’s Choice Theory states that we have control over our behaviour if we choose, and a recognition of this by a teacher in the classroom can lead to “classroom meetings” where dialogue establishes a negotiated reasonable behaviour. This is familiar to teachers when in their first lessons, the teacher and class construct a set of agreed class rules and pin them to the wall (ideas summed up in WikEd).
This negotiated discipline scheme was supposed to go hand-in-hand with a curriculum where no student could fail. Poor marks were discarded and portfolios were assembled with selections of successful student work. Assignments at Emanuel School could be negotiated as Glasser suggested. Students could choose parallel assignments of their own choosing through negotiation with the teacher. The theory behind this was that students would succeed on projects they had selected, felt ownership over and had an interest in.
Every theory has its downside, and Glasser can seem somewhat pollyannaish. There are times when a teacher needs to make clear that he/she is the boss because of the extra responsibilities and accountabilities carried by the teacher. A negotiated curriculum can leave out the dull but essential.
Howard Gardner
Gardner’s is an idealistic and charitable approach to humankind. It attacks the mean-minded classification by psychometric tests of people into a human hierarchy based on general intelligence. Gardner claims that the Multiple Intelligence theory is based empirically on the study of gifted individuals and stroke victims, but the flexibility of his definition of intelligence allows a dangerous proliferation of new intelligences as time goes by. It seems very like pseudo-science.
Gardner himself is worried about the misconceptions surrounding his theory and is perturbed by the interchange of “leaning styles” with “multiple intelligence”. These are not the same things. He is uncertain as to his Multiple Intelligences theory's precise educational application, and he has been an observer of educators as they have tried to put his theory into action in schools.
In his 1998 Scientific American article, Gardner lists the intelligences as:
1. linguistic;
2. logical-mathematical;
3. musical;
4. spatial;
5. bodily-kinesthetic;
6. interpersonal;
7. intrapersonal;
8. naturalist;
9. existential….the two last being added later.
His definition of an intelligence is “a psychological potential to process information so as to solve problems or to fashion products that are valued in at least one cultural context” (p.3). The cultural context part makes us think of Vygotsky.
It is a charitable thing to allow schools to see “that children are smart in different kinds of ways” (p. 6), and it is almost utopian in that the implication of his theory is to ask schools to find different ways of reaching students who are not already responding to conventional teaching strategies (that horrible term “pedagogy”). It is little wonder that Gardner is the favourite of Special Education units in schools.
Reference List
Fetherston, T. (2006) Becoming an Effective Teacher, Melbourne: Nelson, Chapters 5-8.
Finn, C. & Ravitch, D. (1996) “A Report from the Educational Excellence network to its Education Policy Committee and the American People” in Education Reform 1995-6 retrieved from http://tonymcarthur.edublogs.org/ed4236-resources/
Gardner, H. (1998) “A Multiplicity of Intelligences: In tribute to Professor Luigi Vignola” published in Scientific American and retrieved from http://tonymcarthur.edublogs.org/ed4236-resources/
Gardner, H. (date unknown) “MI after Twenty Years” retrieved from http://tonymcarthur.edublogs.org/ed4236-resources/
Hattie, J. (2003) “Teachers Make a Difference: What is the Research Evidence?” – a paper delivered at the ACER Annual Conference on Building Teacher Quality held at the University of Auckland October 2003. The text is retrieved from http://tonymcarthur.edublogs.org/ed4236-resources/
Sprinthall, R.C. & Sprinthall, N.A. (1981) Educational Psychology – A Developmental Approach (3rd edition), Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley.
http://en.wkipedia.org/wki/jerome_Bruner (03/27/2007 10:27 AM)
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Control_theory (03/29/2007 04:15 PM)
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