Chapter 3 - Reflection

Chapter 3 had a reoccurring topic of being able to provide developmentally appropriate activities based on science. The authors were able to say it in different ways, but all the information presented was from the same theme or topic.
In a sense the idea of thinking about providing developmentally appropriate activities surprised me. I never spent a lot of time thinking about this. When planning lesson plans, those thoughts just happened naturally. I never spent a lot of time thinking about planning activities using those specific words. I just thought about if I felt a child at a specific age group could handle whatever I was going to present or have them do.
I was also surprised at the fact that Piaget’s four cognitive stages were included in this chapter. It has been a while since I have seen much on the theorists. It surprised me that the authors included this information in this chapter, but in a sense it also made sense to include this information. If you really think about it, all of Piaget’s stages really apply to having a child do a science activity. Although, I feel that it would apply to more than just science activities. I never thought of applying it to science activities before.
I think that the new view of learning in chapter 3 really made sense. Even though it hasn’t been that long since I was in school, I don’t remember teachers taking the new view into consideration or applying it at all. If I remember correctly, they were still going by the traditional ways. “The traditional view of learning is that knowledge is discovered through the manipulation of objects or acquired from others when learners listen to what they say. However, we now accept that learning is more complex than that. Knowledge cannot be passed intact from a teacher or a book to a learner, nor is it simply discovered in the real world. Students must construct new knowledge for themselves. This view of learning is called constructivism. In the constructivist perspective, new knowledge is always based on the prior or existing knowledge that learners bring to learning situations" (Bass, 63). This approach actually makes more sense than the traditional way. Children actually do use prior knowledge and build on it to create new knowledge, it just does not happen. Knowledge is created by the taking old information and adding new information to create more information on the already existing knowledge. Even though students read textbooks and listen to teacher lead instruction, this information they are hearing is also added to the already existing information in their brains. In some form or another it is all connected.
Would teachers that already are teaching that went to school before this approach was found or even considered, are they accepting this approach? Do these teachers completely support this approach? Would these teachers be able to convert their thinking to forget the traditional approach and only think about the constructivism approach?