What has creating the lesson plan and presentation for The Island Foundation taught you about the way children learn best?
Before this project, I thought children would learn best when the teachers were very strict, because they are too young to know what should do and what should not. When there are rules and punishments restricting them, I thought they would be more focused. However, from the online research and the conversation with Mrs. Nicholas, the head of grade of elementary school, I learnt that we need to be very patient and kind with children while teaching them. It’s true that children are harder to focus on class for a long period of time, so what we need to do is to attract their attention by using visual or physical activities, instead of forcing them to concentrate. Therefore, the best way for children’s learning is including some appropriate activities, allowing them to be engaged in class all the time.
What connections can you draw between Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and/or Vygotsky’s social learning theory and the way you have constructed your lesson? Consider what you have been learning in Integrated Humanities.
According to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, children in age 7-11 years are in a concrete operation stage, which means they can work things out internally in their brains rather than physically trying things out in the real world. Our group focus on the age group 7-9, so relating to this theory, we designed some activities to let them think individually and develop their own ideas. In this way, children will feel more engaged instead of only teachers talking. Also, during this stage, children’s thinking becomes more logical and organized, so in our lesson plan, we included some cause-and-effect logic like “Because of …, and therefore…”, which makes them to think logically.
Why is this approach to learning important for meeting Indonesia’s development needs? Refer back to the Catalyzing Productive Livelihood report from earlier in the unit.
According to the Catalyzing Productive Livelihood report, meeting Indonesia’s development needs requires improvements in teacher quality, school leadership and governance, vocational education, and early childhood education and development. The approach to learning I discussed in the last question focuses on improving early childhood education and development, since the ability of children to think logically and independently will benefit a lot for their future learning, as they can develop their own ideas from the things they learnt and come up with new questions and investigations. Generally, this gives students’ ownership on their learning and become more active in class.