The field of education is full of jargon. There are buzzwords and talking points hammered home so that it is clear what the intentions of teaching (and assessment!) are. One reason this happens is that teachers have specialized their education in order to become a teacher and have spent a good amount of time around other teachers.
The technical language of education mainly comes from teacher education and professional development. Giving parents a quick introduction into what teachers learn in graduate teaching programs can make the jargon a little more clear, and bring about ideas for ways in which parents can support their own child’s learning.
One of the first things teachers learn is about the cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget. Piaget was an educational researcher who developed a foundational stage theory about how children develop intellectually. This is limited to children, and theories suggest that adults also have stages of intellectual development of their own.
The youngest children, according to Piaget, are developmentally in a sensorimotor stage. They learn and develop based on their sensory and motor experiences. Language begins to take shape and word acquisition happens exponentially. Interesting connection between sensory, motor (motion), and language development occurring that effectively and simultaneously.
When children are in the early elementary grades, the stage they are in is referred to as the pre-operational stage. Formal operations and procedures are not known and children will make up their own rules and use symbolic play to represent the real world they are learning about. Both play and direct instruction are required at this stage.
Once students move into the pre-adolescent years, the thinking becomes more logical and systematic (which may come as a surprise, but this is the theory). This is the concrete operational stage. Symbols relate to real things and operations – and norms – begin to settle in. Children at this age aggregate in peer groups where they feel the most understood. Things need to be concrete. It is a significant transitional period, and kids flock to familiarity. In order to learn, students need to be in a comfortable environment.
Moving out of this stage, students begin to develop formal operational thinking. This type of thinking combines operations, symbols and allows students to begin to think abstractly. This is a jump in conceptual and cognitive development that teachers need to be concerned with as high school is the last certain chance that a person will experience formal education.
Moving a student into abstract thinking allows the reflection, analysis, and evaluation that are the foundation of critical thinking. For adults, they are of such great significance, that the development of abstract and conceptual thinking is a key to successfully developing past adolescence. Parents, just like teachers, have the teen years as the last chance before higher education and work take over to help promote higher-order cognition. Knowledge, discussion, opportunities to reflect and to extrapolate are some of the most important things parents can do. Simple as it may seem, the educational jargon is about just that.
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