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Standard #1.2

Learner Development

Robin Kornfield

University of Alaska Southeast

ED698 Master’s Portfolio

Dr. Beth Hartley

March 13, 2023

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InTASC Standard #1.2: Learner Development

The teacher understands ways that learners grow and develop, recognizing that
patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive,
linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements
developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences.

The opportunity to teach in pre-school and kindergarten classrooms recently reinforced

for me the range of learner development represented among young students who are very close

in age. Several of the students could write their name legibly and they could read from an age-

level book, while others were not ready to write their name, perhaps due to the physical

challenge of poor hand/eye coordination, and they had not made the connection between letters,

words, and communication. My own daughter, born in October, started kindergarten later than

many of the students in her class yet she was not ready to read until she was nearly seven.

Students come with a range of skills and teachers must assess the individual students and design

lessons that address the learning level of each student.

Pre-school and kindergarten classes are valuable places to introduce lifelong social and

emotional skills according to Maurice Elias (2022), who outlines key early learner skills

including learning how to operate in a classroom, mastering emotions, how to converse with

others, and to begin problem-solving. Creating a safe and welcoming classroom, offering

predictable routines, explicit instruction, enjoyable activities including songs and games, and

regular reminders about behavior expectations help early learners get off to a good start in their

learning development (Elias, 2022).

My education psychology class introduced Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who observed

through cognitive development research that children are not just small adults, and that they

develop according to a fixed four-stage timetable (as cited in Slavin, 2018). Piaget called birth to
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age two the sensorimotor stage; age two to six the pre-operational stage when children learn

early language skills and are egocentric, able to play in parallel with other children, but not with

them; ages 7 through 11 the concrete operational years, when children think logically but do not

understand abstract ideas; and finally, the formal operational stage from age 12 on, when people

learn how to think abstractly and to reason.

I have attached a short artifact from an assignment in ED333

https://robinkornfieldportfolio.weebly.com/learner--development-artifacts.html which my class

was asked to interview three young people of different ages to find out how each would resolve a

conflict. The conflict I presented had to do with a three-year-old boy who repeatedly ran out of

the house into potential danger. The solutions offered by the three children I interviewed

supported Piaget’s observations, with the older child, age 10, offering multiple perspectives that

might help the mother in the scenario; the middle child, age 6, who was fixated on punishment as

a solution to the problem; and the other child, age 5, proposing baby gates that would not let the

escaping child out as the most logical solution. The scenario gave me a limited view into the

thought process presented by the pre-operational younger children contrasted with the

perspective of a child in the concrete operational stage.

My practicum work and student teaching were spent primarily in 4th grade classrooms.

Like the younger students, the intermediates require a safe and welcoming classroom, predictable

routines, explicit instruction, enjoyable activities, and regular reminders about behavior

expectations. The jump from the early learners to intermediates is significant, though. By the 4th

grade students have moved from sounding out letters and writing their name to knowing how to

read, write, and do math. The fourth graders I worked with were observant of one another, quick

to report on injustice, and they seemed excited about their favorite subject, whether it was art,
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P.E., or math. Veteran teacher Mike Anderson (2010) wrote that 4th graders are not little kids any

longer, but they are also not quite adolescents. They are intense and sometime self-critical, they

love silly poetry and jokes, they need movement, and should be given a choice of whether they

want to work sitting or standing (Anderson, 2010). Classmates enjoyed working together but

were sometimes unkind and had to be reminded about how to be polite and inclusive of all

students.

I found Anderson’s perspective to hold true as I worked with a 4th grade class on the

introduction of plot and summarization using trickster stories. I have attached my reflection on

the trickster lesson on plot and summarization as an artifact.

https://robinkornfieldportfolio.weebly.com/learner--development-artifacts.html

A pre-assessment determined that none of the students had prior knowledge about plot.

We began with an explanation of plot using a graphic in the shape of a mountain that is

commonly used to demonstrate how a story is told starting with an introduction that provides

background information, continuing with series of conflicts that lead to a climax, followed by a

series of events that resolve the conflict. It was particularly effective to take advantage of an on-

line silly song and cartoon called “Plot Mountain” (scratchgarden.com). This video did a great

job reinforcing the plot concept and illustrated how a sequence of events can be presented as a

mountain. The students loved this little on-line tool and would have liked to watch it all

afternoon.

The gradual release of responsibility lessons were presented in series from “I do” and

“We do”, to “We do together”, a collaboration among students recommended by Fisher and Frey

(2014), and the final step, the independent student’s “You do” assignment. Over a week we
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developed several plot mountain charts, and we summarized four stories working both in groups

and individually.

The 4th grade Reach for Reading language arts anthology (Frey, N., Kratky, L., Nonie,

K., et al., 2017) features several stories about animals including the traditional story, Anansi, the

Spider, which is the one I used to demonstrate how to design a plot mountain. We read the story

together and I modeled my thoughts out loud while demonstrating how to turn the plot sequence

into a summary of the story. The students and I read a more detailed version of the Anansi story

to develop a plot mountain together. Students then collaborated, working in small groups to read

Tops and Bottoms, by Janet Stevens, a very fun book about a rabbit who tricked a bear, and they

designed plot mountain charts in groups. Individually, students summarized the book in their

personal reading notebooks. Finally, groups of two selected their own trickster story, read, and

discussed it together before individually producing their own plot chart and final summary.

Checklists (attached in reflection) guided expectations throughout each of the trickster

lessons. Final assessments demonstrated learning development from the initial plot mountain

exercise to the increased proficiency in summary writing over the course of the week-long unit.

Students who scored very low initially showed dramatic improvement on both the plot lesson

and the summarization. Advanced students also showed improvement, especially on plot

development, but also on summarization even when their initial score was high.

Fourth graders are 9 and 10 years old, which is the development stage Piaget described as

the Concrete Operational Stage (as cited in Slavin, 2017). By this stage, children have practical

problem-solving skills for situations that are familiar to them. They can arrange and compare

objects, and they are beginning to be able to deal with hypothetical abstractions and imagine that

people, or the characters in our stories, might have more than one point of view. The plot
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mountain and summary assignment of carefully reading and recording a series of events uses a

task called seriation (Slavin, 2017, p. 37) which is to order objects or, as in this case, events, in

proper sequence. Working collaboratively and individually the post assessment for these students

demonstrated the ability understand the trickster stories, to seriate the events, and to use proper

writing and grammatical skills in summarizing the stories.

I found myself working on my own learning development in the trickster project as I

practiced gradual release of responsibility techniques (Fisher & Frey, 2013). In the “I do” stage it

is important to model what I am thinking as I show how to develop a plot mountain. For the

summary I shared my thought process out loud and talked about keeping the paragraphs short

and choosing to only include the most important parts. For the “We do” step the students are

offered the opportunity to contribute and to share their reasoning. I found in my practice that it is

tempting to step back in and guide when it is time for students to work independently, so in the

“You do” stage I hovered in close proximity and reminded everyone about the project’s checklist

but left the work to the students. By the time this trickster unit was complete, the students had

four opportunities to produce a plot mountain and to summarize the stories.

The next step I would work on if I had the opportunity to continue to teach these students

is to help them dig deeper in their learning by prompting higher order discussion between the

students, rather than with me as teacher. Fisher and Frey (2013) recommend prompting questions

that begin with why, suppose, and how rather than words like what, who, and when. Higher

order questioning, they write, helps students engage in complex thinking and develops cognitive

flexibility, which are skills that go beyond simply memorizing information or organizing events.

An example might be a prompt that asks the students to discuss why the author might have

chosen a snake, bees and a cobra for the challenges Anansi had to overcome. I would be
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interested in learning if the students are able to take on the perspective of the author in their

responses.
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References

Anderson, M. (2010). What every fourth-grade teacher needs to know about setting up and

running a classroom. Center for Responsive Schools.

Elias, M. (2022). Social and emotional skill progression in preschool. Edutopia. edutopia.com.

Fisher, D. & Frey, N. (2013). Better learning through structured teaching: A framework for the

gradual release of responsibility. (2nd Ed.) International Reading Association.

Frey, N., Lada, L., Nonie, K., Short, D. & Thompson, S.L. (2017). Reach for Reading (4th

Ed.) National Geographic.

Perrone, V. (1991). A letter to teachers: Reflections on schooling and the art of teaching. Jossey

Bass Publishers.

Scratch Garden (2018). Plot Mountain. scratchgarden.com/videos/plot-mountain.

Slavin, R.E. (2018). Educational psychology: Theory and practice. (12th.ed.) Pearson

Publishing.