piaget rediscovered --- eleanor duckworth -- jrst --- vol 2 #3 --- 1964 --- pp172-75
Leyden note:
She is the author of the article you read on the first day of class -- about helium balloons & mirrors.
In 1968, the American Educational Research Association recognized Jean Piaget as the most outstanding contributor to the fills of cognitive development in children . He has produced over thirty books and more than 100 articles in this field. His work with conservation problems is probably best known and pursued in greatest detail by other researchers. Piaget's early training as a zoologist ( Ph.D. at the age of 21) has caused him to view the child as a complex organism functioning as a totality. Shortly after receiving his Ph. D. in zoology in Switzerland, he explored psychology and noticed some puzzling aspects of the thinking of young children. These early experiences led Piaget to explore the thinking of his own children in great detail and he began to publish books and articles during the 1920s on his observations.

He presently directs the activities at the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute at Geneva University and continues to publish the results of his studies. Mrs. Duckworth did two years of graduate research at the "Institut des Science de l' education " in Geneva with Piaget and the following paper is her account of Piaget's contributions to a 1964 conference at Cornell University.

Everybody in education realizes that Piaget is saying something that is relevant to the teaching of children. For the most part he is understood to be underestimation the value of teaching.

He's understood to be saying something like this:

Children go through certain stages of intellectual development from birth through adolescence. These stages materialize, fully constructed, when their time has come, and there is little we can do to advance them. What we must do in education is to realize the limits of children's understanding at certain ages, and plan our teaching so it falls within these limits.

In two recent conferences, one at Cornell, one at Berkeley, Piaget made clear that the implications of his psychology for education are a good deal more fecund than this. In fact, the only one of these statements that he would support is that children go through certain stages if intellectual development. Contrary to the view moat often attributed to him, he maintains that good pedagogy can have an effect on this development.

I will start with the essentials of Piaget's theory of intellectual development, as presented at these conferences, and then go on to some implications for education. Development of intellectual capacity goes through a number of stages whose order is constant, but whose time of appearance may vary both with the individual and with the society. Each new level of development is a new coherence, a new structuring of elements which until that time have not been systematically related to each other.

Piaget discussed four factors contributing to this development:

While the first three do indeed play a role, Piaget finds each of them insufficient in itself. His findings lead him to concise that an individual's intellectual development is a process of equilibration, where the individual himself is the active motor and coordinator of his own development.

What the first three factors have in common is that the individual is passive.

Something is done to him -- his physiological system matures, or he is presented with physical or linguistic material to absorb. But intellectual development is not this passive. Piaget finds it necessary to call upon the factor of the individual's own activity. An individual comes to see the world as coherent, as structured, to the extent that he acts upon the world, transform it, and succeeds in coordination these actions and transformations.

Development proceeds as partial understandings are revised, broadened, and related to one another. Piaget's model for this is one of auto-regulation to attain ever broader and more stable equilibrium in the individual's dealing with his world.

As far as education is concerned, the chief outcome of this theory of intellectual development is a plea that children be allowed to do their own learning.

Leyden note:
that is called constructivism. YOU have to teach yourself. Dr. Leyden will not teach you in this course.
He will give you opportunities to teach yourself.
He will not motivate you.
You decide you want to be or do not want to be dumb as a rock -- and do something about it.

Piaget is not saying that intellectual development proceeds at its own pace no matter what you try to do. He is saying that what schools usually try to do is ineffectual. You cannot further understanding in a child simply by talking to him. Good pedagogy must involve presenting the child with situations in which he himself experiments, the broadest sense of that term -- trying to see what happens, manipulating things, manipulating symbols, posing questions and seeking his own answers, reconciling what he finds one time with what he finds at another, comparing his findings with those of other children.

Beyond this general implication, Piaget does not claim to be an educator. During the course of the two conferences he made no single discourse on pedagogy. But he made a number of points which I have gathered together here. Most of them are not new ideas; but it seems to me that it is of importance, somehow, to realize that this is what he is saying.

I shall start with comments on one or two teaching practices often associated with Piaget's name, because of some relationships to his research. One is the head-on attack on a specific notion in a precise and limited way. This is the type of attack engaged in by psychological experimenters, in trying to teach 4 and 5 year old, for example that the amount of liquid stays the same when poured into a glass of a different shape. ( Piaget's own research, when a child asserts that the same amount of liquid is conserved, this is taken as an indication of a certain structure of mental operations. For this reason, performance on this task is an important indicator of intellectual level. )

Piaget sees little sense in intensive specific training on tasks like this one.

His feeling is that no learning of any significance will take place. Even if the child does manage to learn something about this situation, the learning is not likely to have a general effect on his level of understanding.

But notice that he is not thereby saying that a young child's mental structure cannot be touched. He is only saying that this type of specific attack is rather trivial. Modifying a child's effective set of mental operations depends on a much wider, longer-lasting and fundamental approach, which involves all of the child's activity.

Piaget amplified this point about the importance of investigative activity in general in reply to a question on cross-cultural comparisons. Montreal psychologists using Piaget's material as tests, found children in Martinique to be delayed several years over children in Montreal. Similarly, there is a significant delay of children in Iranian villages over children in Iranian cities. Piaget was asked what factors in the adult societies might account for these differences.

In reply, he first pointed out that the schools in Martinique follow the same curriculum as the schools in France, so that scholastic preparation was not likely to account for the difference. Then he quoted the psychologist who had done the research in Martinique, who pointed out that the climate is fine, agriculture flourishes and living poses no problems. There seems to be little call for questioning and struggling for solutions--in general, little call for either physical or intellectual activity. Piaget speculated that this could be the significant factor.

Another pedagogical approach often associated with Piaget's name has to do with "teaching the structure" of a subject matter area. This has been associated with him because of the importance that mental structures play in his psychological theory. The word "structure" is seized upon as the link.

The pedagogical idea is that children should be taught the unifying themes of a subject matter area, after which they will be able to relate individual items to this general structure. ( This seems to be what Brunner often means by "teaching the structure" in The Process of Education. ) Commenting on this procedure, Piaget made the following statement:

The question comes up whether to teach the structure, or to present the child with situations where he is active and creates the structures himself. . . The goal in education is not to increase the amount of knowledge, but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover. When we teach too fast, we keep the child from inventing and discovering himself. . . Teaching me and creating situations where structures can be discovered; it does not mean transmitting structures which may be assimilated at nothing other than a verbal level.

Piaget addressed two remarks to problems of teacher training.

The first is that adults, as well as children, can learn better by doing things than by being told about them. He was talking about teachers in training, when he said, "If they read about it, it will be deformed, as is all learning that is not the result of the subjectÕs own activity."

The second is that prospective teachers ought to spend some time questioning children in a one-to-one situation, in order to realize how hard it is to understand what children mean, and even more, how hard it is to make oneself understood by children.

Each prospective teacher should work on an original investigation to find out what children think about some problem -- and thus be forced to phrase the problem and establish communication with a number of different children. Facing the difficulties of this type of research will have a sobering effect on a teacher who thinks he is talking successfully to a whole class of children at once.

Permit me one other point of psychological theory, as context for another of Piaget's remarks. Piaget sees the process of equilibration as a process of balance between assimilation and accommodation in a biological sense. An individual assimilates the world-which comes down to saying he sees it in his own way. But sometimes something presents itself in such a way that he cannot assimilate it into his view of things, so he must change his view--he must accommodate if he wants to incorporate this new item.

The question arose in this conference as to whether school situations could lead a child to accommodate wrongly -- that is, to change his ideas on the wrong basis. Piaget replied: "This is a very interesting question. This is a big danger of school- -false accommodation which satisfies a child because it agrees with a verbal formula he has been given. This is a false equilibrium which satisfies a child by accommodating to words -- to authority and not to objects as they present themselves to him. . . A teacher would do better not to correct a child's schemes, but to provide situations so he will correct them himself."

Here are a few other remarks at random:
Experience is always necessary for intellectual development . . . . But I fear that we may fall into the illusion that being submitted to an experience ( a demonstration ) is sufficient for a subject to disengage the structure involved. But more than this is required. The subject must be active, must transform things and find the structure of his own actions on the objects.

When I say, "active," I mean it in two senses.

One is acting on material things. But the other means doing things in social collaboration, in a group effort. This leads to a critical frame of mind, where children must communicate with each other. This is an essential factor in intellectual development. Cooperation is indeed cooperation.

( The role of social interaction is important in Piaget's theory of development. A characteristic phenomenon in intellectual difficulties of pre-school children is that they have difficulty conceiving of any point of view other than their own. Coming to an awareness that another child sees something differently from the way he sees it plays an important role in bringing a child to accommodate, to rebuild his point of view, and come closer to a coherent operational structure. )

The best idea I have heard from a pedagog at the International Bureau of Education in Geneva was made by a Canadian. He said that in his province they had just decided every class should have two classrooms -- one where the teacher is, and one where the teacher isn't.

The teacher must provide the instruments which the children can use to decide things by themselves. Children themselves must verify, experimentally in physics, deductively in mathematics. Already-made truth is only a half-truth.

One participant asked what Piaget thought of having children of different ages in a class together. He replied that it might be helpful especially for the older ones. They could be given some responsibility of teaching younger ones. "Nobody knows better than a professor that the best way to learn something is to teach it."

Yes. the element of surprise is an essential motive in education and in scientific research in general. What distinguishes a good scientist is that he is amazed by things which seem natural to others. Surprise plays an important role; we might try to develop an aptitude for surprise.

Words, are probably not a short-cut to a better understanding . . . . The level of understanding seems to modify the language that is used, rather than vice-versa. . . . Mainly, language serves to translate what is already understood; or else language may even present a danger if it is used to introduce an idea which is not yet accessible.

The principal goal of education is to create men ( leyden: men only ? such was the langauge at the time this was written ) who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done -- men who are creative, inventive, and discoverers.
The second goal of education is to form minds which can be critical, can verify, and not accept everything they are offered. The great danger today is of slogans, collective opinions, ready-made trends of thought. We have to be able to resist individually, to criticize, to distinguish between what is proven and what is not. So we need pupils who are active, who learn early to find out by themselves, partly by their own spontaneous activity and partly through material we set up for them; who learn early to tell what is verifiable and what is simply the first idea to come to them.