Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum and Instruction

Pedagogy for Knowledge, Attitudes, and Values

Ana Garcia-Nevarez, Kimberly A. Gordon Biddle, Ana Garcia-Nevarez, Kimberly A. Gordon Biddle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000362657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This timely and accessible volume explores how our understanding of research in child development can help cultivate the knowledge, skills, and attitudes children need for informed and thoughtful participation in society by viewing the curriculum through a developmental lens.

Gordon Biddle and Garcia-Nevarez cover a range of key topics including characteristics of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial development of children; heritable and environmental influences on children's developing self; language and literacy development; mathematical cognition; growth mindsets; and evidence-based positive behavioral interventions and supports. The expert team of contributors offers an advanced exploration of developmental science and how this applies to learning and education in order to create inclusive environments that support children with a range of abilities, including those with the most significant medical, intellectual, and developmental delays. Each chapter contains boxes exploring how the topic relates to the themes of "Promoting Social and Emotional Competence Theory," "Research to Practice Connection," "Common Core and Other Standards," and "Social Justice and Diversity," ensuring comprehensive and consistent coverage across the volume.

Developmentally Appropriate Curriculum and Instruction will be essential reading for students of child development and education, as well as educators and those in teacher training who are interested in how theory and research can be effectively harnessed to improve children's outcomes.

Chapter 1

Developmental Learning Theories

Wanda J. Roundtree

In memory of my soulmate... whose perpetual smile always lifted me.

Dr. Darryl O. Henderson
1961-2017

Introduction

Imagine, if you will, a scenario that portrays a teacher–student dyad engaged in an intersubjective teaching-learning task that involves stringing beads of different sizes, shapes, and colors. This relatively popular learning task has been proven to be instrumental in assisting young students’ development of their fine motor skills, including their acquisition of a range of other skills vital to students’ successful reading, letter recognition, story-sequencing, writing, etc. Hence, a four-year-old Transitional Kindergarten (TK) student, otherwise known as “the less expert other,” must refer to a series of picture cards, each depicting a specific stringing pattern or sequence. The teacher, often referred to as the “more expert other” within the context of the classroom, attempts to scaffold the student’s development within the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Working in collaboration with the teacher, the student attempts to string the beads according to the specific sequence depicted on each card.

As a teacher of elementary school-age students, you are probably quite familiar with the deployment of scaffolding strategies during student–teacher interactions. The countless teacher–student transactions that you have experienced or witnessed at some point in your teaching career demonstrate the very essence of what constitutes a successful teaching-learning episode. Every exchange between the teacher and student underscores the very crucial role that parents, guardians, teachers, and significant others play in bolstering children’s (cognitive) development. The teacher carefully scaffolds the student’s development within her respective zone of mastery. Ultimately, the process results in an intersubjective experience in which the pair, having begun the task with varying ideas as to how to complete it, eventually arrives at a shared understanding of the task at hand. And while scaffolding scenarios within the classroom primarily focus on bolstering the student’s cognitive abilities, it is impossible to ignore the elements of social-emotional and physical functioning on behalf of the student. Each domain of development works both independently and in concert with other developmental domains to spur students’ motivation and varied approaches to learning. This understanding should, therefore, pique our interests about the importance of carefully considering individual students’ gifts, talents, propensities, multiple intelligences, temperament styles, cultural, personal/familial, and linguistic attributes when planning for students. What we have come to understand is that the three broad domains of development—cognitive, physical, social-emotional—must never be viewed in isolation or as distinct aspects of development, separate and apart from each other, but rather the three broad domains must be seen as a holistic, well-integrated and dynamic system, each contributing individually and collectively to the child’s overall functioning within any given context in which development or growth is occurring.

To be an effective teacher, it is necessary to have a rather sophisticated view of development. So, how should we as educators view development? It is important to note that investigations into developmental science, especially as it relates to child development, have centered on whether development should be viewed as continuous or discontinuous. While some developmental theorists believe that human development is continuous, which is a view that attributes variations in developmental abilities among the immature vis-a-vis the mature as a matter of amount or complexity, other theorists simply maintain that developmental changes or novel ways of behaving or responding to the world at specific stages across the early phase of the lifespan is discontinuous. Thus, these two opposing views simply come down to viewing developmental changes or constancy, at any point in growth, as either quantitatively or qualitatively different. Equally debatable has been the question of biological determinants and their impact on individuals’ development and to what extent we can attribute the environment and/or the whole range of human experience to a person’s development. Nevertheless, we can find solace in the fact that extreme views concerning these questions are no longer in vogue. Today, most recent theorists assume a middle-of-the-ground stance on these issues, recognizing that development can be both continuous and discontinuous and that human development is much more plastic than originally thought. Most theorists today recognize that the impact of an individual’s life experiences may wax and wane across domains and over the course of the lifespan, and that both environmental and genetic factors have been found to have an indelible impact on development (Berk & Myers, 2016).

While most critical questions regarding learning and development have already been answered by theorists during the early to mid-twentieth century, there are some questions concerning development that still warrant further observation and study. Nevertheless, this chapter seeks to provide the teaching professional with answers to some of the most fundamental questions about how young students come to “know” and provides a basic overview of the quintessential theories of learning and development that we uphold today. The theories discussed below are “blueprints” of the human change process and provide a sound basis for our understanding of how and why humans change as they age.

The Constructivist View of Learning

Most learning and developmental theories underscore the vital role that a child’s environment and significant adults (mother, father, teacher, and/or other consistent caregivers) play in the life of a developing child. Young children are constantly interacting with their physical and social worlds; it is how they come to know and understand the people and things around them. Children are active and persistent in their approach to construct their own meaning of their world; they have a natural ability to think about their actions and social interactions. Children’s motivation to understand the inner workings of the world around them is the very essence of the constructivist view of learning. Structural changes in the way children come to think about their world are a direct result of their myriad of experiences. They seem to be always about the business of framing and reframing their mental structures (altering their thought processes) as they derive meaning from their daily experiences and interactions. Children are like “little construction engineers”; in much the same way that construction workers need tools, nails, and steel to build a building, young children need people, places, and things in order to construct their knowledge of their personal world.

Knowledge is not simply floating around in space somewhere waiting for someone to come along and grab it. In fact, the only true knowledge that exists is the knowledge we construct for ourselves. Constructivists believe that knowledge cannot simply be “spoon-fed” to children. Children’s learning process must consist of hands-on experiences that engage both their bodies and minds; children must have the opportunity to experience the world through their many senses as well as to process that sensory data. Educators who uphold a constructivist view of learning facilitate children’s thinking by seeking varied opportunities to engage them. They encourage collaborative and peer learning among children, organize stimulating and challenging classroom environments, and provide numerous opportunities for children to problem solve on their own. These teachers facilitate children’s learning by focusing their attention to details, modeling, guiding children’s behavior, asking questions, and getting children to think “a head above”, sort to speak, their developmental capacity.

Box 1.1 Theory and Research to Practice Connection

The Benefits of Social Constructivist Classrooms for Both Students and Teachers

Carefully researched and well-crafted theories can certainly persist over time. Such is the case with regard to the theories developed by both Piaget and Vygotsky. Indeed, their theories, which have stood the test of time, have contributed considerably to developmental scientists’ and educators’ understanding of the intricacies of human development and cognition. Sharkins et al. (2017), in their research article entitled “Flipping Theory: Ways in Which Children’s Experiences in the 21st-Century Classroom Can Provide Insight into the Theories of Piaget and Vygotsky,” discuss ways in which the two theories converge to promote teachers’ pedagogy and knowledge about students in today’s classroom contexts.

Located within a large metropolitan area, a first-grade classroom in a small community school, utilizing the principles of Charlotte Mason (2008), portrayed a vivid demonstration of constructivist principles at work as children examined themselves and developed high moral standards. Teachers regularly provided guidance by asking students open-ended questions that encouraged imagination and the construction of knowledge, and teachers provided gentle guidance aimed at helping students to derive their own solutions to real-life and academic challenges. Students were given time to work at their own pace, to explain their thought processes, and to engage in self-correction. Similarly, in a suburban, more traditional elementary kindergarten classroom, located on the opposite side of town, constructivist principles were also at work, as evidenced by the transactions between the teacher and students as well as among peers. During a shared storybook reading, the teacher employed distancing strategies and open-ended questioning techniques in order to get students to think more comprehensively about their responses. Students were encouraged to think about the “things that they noticed” and to share these observations with their peers and teacher. They were also afforded the “right” to change or correct their answer to a response and to defend their respective viewpoints, etc. Furthermore, students were encouraged to write their own stories with illustrations; phonetic spelling was supported so that students could focus on the story.

Math tasks in both of these settings indicated that youngsters were functioning in both Piaget’s preoperational and concrete operational stage of development. Teachers’ flexibility in allowing the students to use their fingers or counting markers as they constructed concepts of number ordinality and cardinality further underscored the importance of connecting theory to classro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Authors
• List of Contributors
• 1 Developmental Learning Theories
• 2 Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports
• 3 Engaging Students’ Learning and Thinking Through Reading
• 4 Language and Literacy Development
• 5 Mathematics
• 6 Social and Emotional Learning
• 7 Movement, Visual, and Performing Arts
• 8 Embracing Diversity to Humanize the Classroom Environment
• 9 Developmental Diversity in the Classroom
• 10 Assessment and Evaluation
• 11 Parent, Families, and Community Engagement
• 12 Educational Policy in Context
• Index