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Child Development is a sequence physical, language, thought, and emotional changes

that occur in a child from birth to the beginning of adulthood. As an educator, it is very important

to know which stage of development your students are currently in and adjust your instruction

accordingly in order to meet each student’s individual needs. Running Records are a great way

for teachers to assess their student’s reading progress by systematically evaluating a student’s

oral reading and identifying error patterns. Providing on-going assessments helps you to judge

your student’s strengths and weaknesses and enables you to plan lessons specifically for them. 

Understanding how human development levels affect learning and applying that

understanding to practice is key to being an effective teacher. I am continually identifying

student’s developmental levels and how they affect their learning. I also take into account how

students learn based on their social, emotional, an intellectual maturation. Understanding

developmental stages allows me to create developmentally appropriate lessons and activities.

Truly effective teachers understand how children develop and how to apply that

knowledge into creating and implementing lessons into their classrooms that are specific to each

students’ individual needs. Piaget’s theory of human development supports the idea that

education must be developmentally appropriate aligned with student’s physical and cognitive

abilities as well as their social and emotional needs (Cherry, 2019). This artifact, designed for

fourth grade students, incorporates brainstorming, mind mapping, and developing paragraphs

using a topic sentence and three key star ideas.

Prior to creating this lesson, I had to take into account the students’ developmental stages.

Effective teaching strategies must take into account the students’ ages and stages of development

(Slavin, 2003). According to Jean Piaget, there are four stages of cognitive development that

children progress through in a certain order in their lifetime. As children mature, by the first
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grade (age 7-11) they arrive at a less egocentric way of thinking, the concrete operational stage.

Children in this stage, “are not only able to start thinking about how other people view and

experience the world, they even start to use this type of information when making decisions or

solving problems” (Cherry, 2019, p7).

Taking into consideration that fourth grade students are in the concrete operation stage of

development and that they are becoming more logical and sophisticated in their thinking, I

incorporated the concepts of brainstorming, mind mapping, and paragraph development into the

lesson. Scaffolding this lesson using the concepts listed above helped students increase their

skills and knowledge without becoming frustrated with concepts that were too difficult for them.

Several theorists have found that providing a scaffolded writing approach is an effective strategy.

Scaffolding writing is a “successful application of the Vygotskian concept of the zone of

proximal development (ZPD) applied to the area of literacy learning” (Bodrova & Leong, 1998,

p. 1). Vygotsky believed that educators should help students learn within their ZPD. “One of the

major outcomes of this process is the ability to take control of their own behaviors-physical,

social, emotional and cognitive-through employing their higher mental functions” (Bodrova &

Leong, 1996, p. 12).

It is crucial for me to understand how children develop and how to apply that knowledge

into creating and implementing lessons into my classroom that are specific to each students’

individual needs. This enables me to make appropriate decisions about expectations for students,

how to best create student engagement with lesson material, and how to encourage students to

grow academically, emotionally, and socially.

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References:

Bodrova, E., & Leong, D.J. (1996). Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early

childhood education. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Merrill/Prentice Hall. Retrieved from

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED455014.pdf

Bodrova, E. & Leong, D. J. (1998). Scaffolding emergent writing in the zone of proximal

development. Literacy teaching and learning, 3 (2), 1-18. Retrieved from

https://www.readingrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/LTL_3.2-Bodrova-

Leong.pdf

Cherry, K. (2019, May 2). The concrete operational stage of cognitive development. Retrieved

from https://www.verywellmind.com/concrete-operational-stage-of-cognitive-

development-2795458

Slavin, R. (2003). Educational psychology: Theory and practice. Boston: Pearson Education,

Inc.