Piaget's theory in the classroom
- Piaget argued that children think in qualitatively different ways at each stage, so what a child can learn depends on the stage their thinking has reached.
- A child in the pre-operational stage cannot yet decentre or conserve, so a lesson built on neat logical reasoning will not be understood.
- His theory turns up in schools in four ways: key stages, readiness, active learning, and the concept of intelligence.
Key Idea
- Because a child can only take in what their current stage of thinking supports, Piaget's theory turns into decisions about when a topic is taught and how.
- Key stages group pupils by age on the assumption that children of a similar age reason in similar ways.
- Active learning puts a pupil in front of a result that will not fit the schema they hold, which is what makes them rebuild it.
Key stages
- Schools in England group pupils into key stages by age and teach each key stage a set body of content.
- The reasoning comes from Piaget, because children of a similar age are assumed to reason in a similar way and so can be taught similar material.
- Key Stage 1, ages 5 to 7, sits across the pre-operational stage, so the work stays concrete and practical, using counters, cubes and pictures.
- Key Stage 2, ages 7 to 11, matches the concrete operational stage, where a child can conserve and reverse an operation but still reasons best with real objects in front of them.
- Key Stages 3 and 4, ages 11 to 16, expect formal operational thinking, which is when algebra, hypothesis writing and evaluation questions appear.
- Because the stages are invariant, every pupil meets the curriculum in the same order, and a topic is revisited at a higher level later on.
Note
- Piaget never designed key stages himself, so this is an application of his theory rather than something he set out.
- The age ranges of his stages line up only roughly with where the key-stage boundaries fall.
- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland organise school stages differently, so key stages are an English arrangement.
Readiness
Definition
Readiness
In Piaget's theory, the idea that a child can only learn a new concept once their thinking has matured to the right stage. Teaching given before a child is ready will not be properly understood.
- Readiness means the teacher waits until a child's thinking has matured before introducing a concept, so timing matters as much as content.
- Push formal algebra onto a child still reasoning in the concrete operational stage and they may copy the steps without ever seeing why they work.
- Piaget's explanation is that a new idea can only be assimilated into a schema the child already holds, and a concept pitched above the stage has no schema to attach to.
- In practice the teacher checks what a pupil can already do, then sets work that suits the stage they are at now.
Example
- In a Year 2 class, pupils pour the same orange squash between a tall thin beaker and a short wide one and watch the amount stay the same.
- Handling the liquid themselves is how they discover conservation.
Active learning
Definition
Active learning
Teaching that lets a child explore, handle and experiment with real materials so they work an idea out for themselves. It is also called discovery learning, and it follows from Piaget's view that understanding is built by acting on the world.
- Active learning, also called discovery learning, has children explore and experiment for themselves.
- It follows from Piaget's picture of the child as a little scientist who tests ideas against the world.
- Acting on real materials produces a result that clashes with the child's existing schema.
- That clash is what forces accommodation, in which the child alters the schema or splits a new one off from it.
- The teacher's job becomes choosing the materials and the question, then standing back while pupils investigate and reach the conclusion.
- Group work belongs here as well, because disagreeing with another child creates the same clash that drives a schema to change.
Example
- Counters, number lines, sand and water trays and weighing scales are Piaget in the primary classroom.
- A Year 4 pupil who rolls a dice a hundred times and tallies the results works out that each number is about as likely as the others without being told.
The concept of intelligence
- Piaget treated intelligence as something that develops through the stages.
- Education should therefore aim to develop a pupil's reasoning, which makes a single IQ score a poor target for a school to work towards.
- A wrong answer shows which stage of thinking a child is reasoning from, so teachers treat errors as evidence.
- Primary marking therefore asks a pupil how they got their answer.
Criticisms of these applications
- His ideas reshaped UK primary teaching, bringing in maths apparatus, sand and water play and group investigation.
- Strict readiness can be used to hold pupils back, since children often manage more than their stage predicts once a task is worded in a familiar way.
- Active learning is slow, and it leaves gaps whenever a pupil never happens to stumble onto the key idea.
- Teaching a whole key stage as though every pupil is at the same stage ignores how much children of one age differ.
- Piaget says little about what a teacher should explain directly, so schools now pair discovery tasks with explicit teaching.
Note
- Criticism of these applications is a separate matter from criticism of the theory itself, which turns on reductionism and holism.
- A teacher can accept the order of Piaget's stages while treating the ages attached to them as loose.
- Piaget's applications are about when and how to teach, while Dweck's and Willingham's are about beliefs and meaning, so the two sets answer different questions.
Turning this into marks
- When two applications are asked for, take them from different ideas, such as readiness and active learning, rather than one idea reworded.
- Name the Piagetian stage a key stage matches, because saying the work suits the age does not secure the knowledge mark.
- The mark most often lost is naming an application without saying what the teacher actually does in the lesson.
- Use the words assimilation and accommodation when you explain why readiness or active learning works.
Self review
- Which Piagetian stage does Key Stage 2 work match, and what does that mean for the tasks set?
- What is readiness?
- How does active learning lead to accommodation?
- How did Piaget view intelligence, and what should schools aim to do as a result?
- Give one criticism of applying readiness in a real classroom.
