Piaget's Stages (#1 Blog)

I have always been intrigue with the development of the brain but now more than ever. I want to be able to teach and understand my students. From what I have learned is there are many factors that play vital roles in how we learn, some of which are intelligence, reasoning and memory.   Cognitive development is gradually orderly changes by which mental processes become more complex and sophisticated (Woolfolk, 2019). Piaget had many interesting key factors on Cognitive development.

 As a future educator, I would be adopting ideas and psychological theories to better understand and teach my students in there learning process. Woolfolk writes about Jean Piaget whom believes that children develop cognitively through schemes, the building block of thinking. These schemes allows us to ”think about” the objects and events in our world (p.47). Woolfolk use an example, the sucking-through-a-straw scheme or larger scheme drinking scheme. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a constant process of organizing, assimilating, adapting and re-organizing. Piaget believed that people go through four stages in exactly the same way. Piaget’s four stages to cognitive development are Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operations and Formal Operations.

 In the sensorimotor stage, children from babies to two years old experience and gather information and thinking process starts by using the five senses. Toddlers begin to realize object permanence which is the concept that things exist, even when they can’t see it. Woolfolk  gives a perfect example that I have seen in toddlers, the child who searches for the ball that has rolled out of sight is indicating and understanding that objects still exist even when they are not in view (p.49).Children not only learn to crawl and walk, they also learn about language from people who they interact with. I always use to correct my family with babies, when they would call the bottle, Bibi or nicknames. I would tell them to use the appropriate name for the objects because it is the crucial stage when they are developing their language. Preschool teachers and parents should enhance their language, by attaching more words to connect to objects.

The next stage of development is preoperational. During this stage, children are moving toward mastery, but have not yet mastered these mental operations. Kids learn through pretend play but still struggle with logic and taking the point of view of others.  One example is the semiotic function, pretending. Children are often self-centered, or egocentric, at this stage as they don’t know how to see others perspectives. They begin to understand the concept of conservation. One example is that the amount of water in a short wide glass is equal to the tall, skinny glass. 

In the concrete operations stage, children from six to eleven/twelve years old move to the “hands-on” thinking. The stage of recognition of that everyone does not always feel as they feel and see things differently. The realization that elements can be changed or transformed and still conserves many of their original characteristic. (50). A Great information for a teacher, so teacher can enhance the learning style for this developmental stage. For example, children will need more hands on and classifying activities.  Woolfolk uses the example of a child using concrete operation to categorize animals by their physical Characteristics or their habits.

Formal operations stage, Piaget’s last stage, is the ability to handle operations, such as conservation, classification, and seriation; the student developed and completes a very logical of thinking. It’s the ability to make inference. Here the child uses formal operations can perform “ second –order” operations on these categories operations to infer relationships between habitat and physical characteristics-such as understanding that the physical characteristic of thick fur on animals is related to their arctic habitats (Kuhn & Franklin 2006).

 These stages of development demonstrate Piaget’s theory that brain growth and learning correlate with a child’s development.  As Future educators this will helps us when doing our lesson plans and building that relationship with the students.