Why Teachers Need To Understand How Children Think?

The way children think and process information is very interesting. Teachers are responsible for providing children instructions in the classroom, and teachers are responsible for giving children feedback. It takes a lot of patience, training and skills to properly educate students. If teachers want to be successful in the classroom and provide good instruction, they need to know how children learn. Jean Piaget was an educational scholar that studied and wrote scholarly material on how children think. The information and research published by Piaget is an asset to teachers that educate children. Jean Piaget believed that children have stages of intellectual development. Piaget discussed four stages sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete, formal operation.

Piaget believed that children develop sensorimotor skills from birth to age 2. During the sensorimotor stage children learn about their environment. Also, they learn about their reflex actions. The children get their thoughts from sensation and movement at this stage. Also, children begin to learn that they are separate from the environment. The child also values his or her parents and favorite toy. Teaching a child during this stage should be geared toward the child sensorimotor system. Finally, a teacher can modify a child's behavior at this stage by a frown, stern or soothing voice (Patient Teaching, 1990).

Preoperational is another stage of a child's learning. This stage normally occurs from the time a child start to talk to about age 7. At this age, a child begins to use symbols to represent objects. A child is able to think about things and events that aren't immediately present at this age. However, a child has problems comprehending time. Also, a child takes information and then changes it in his mind to fit his or her ideas. Teachers must take into account a child's vivid fantasies and undeveloped sense of time at this stage. Using neutral words, equipment a child can touch gives a child an active role in the learning process (Patient Teaching, 1990).

Next, the concrete stage occurs when a child get into the first grade to early adolescence. At this age, a child develops an ability to think abstractly and to make rational judgments. During this stage, a child must be allowed to ask questions. Also, a child must be allowed to explain things. This allows the child to learn how to mentally manipulate information (Patient Teaching, 1990).

Formal operation is the adolescence stage. This stage brings cognition to its final form. Cognition relates to the process of thought or how a child or person process information, at this stage the child no longer requires concrete objects to make rational judgments. He or she is capable of deductive reasoning (Patient Teaching, 1990).

Understanding how students think enhances a teacher's ability to give good instructions in the classroom. Also, it improves a teacher's ability to interact with the student and guide the student.

The teacher will improve how he or she communicates with the student. This ultimately leads to a good performance from the teacher and student. Understanding the way children think is one of the keys to being a successful teacher.

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Why Teachers Need To Understand How Children Think?

By: Bilal

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