DIY Report
Although there was not too much participation it was fun to see the ideas that the three of us came up with:
1. Sheldon could have started a discussion on the appropriateness of conversational tangents and of using a cell phone while in the company of others. 2. Sheldon should involve Leonard to make the learning more based on social interaction, a discussion between the three of them on appropriate cellphone use. 3. Sheldon could be more Piagetian if he played like Penny's peer instead of her instructor. Maybe he could complain for her conversational tangents and cell phone usage, and when Penny asked him why (that is student-initiative discovery) he could spread his opinions. And if Penny didn't agree with him (that is Piaget's disequilibrium caused by peer interaction), they can have a discussion. From this DIY task, we've learnt how to assimillate Piagetian characteristics out of Behaviorist instruction. We also learnt to accommodate the Piagetian knowledge in our brain to a real world task. We can directly experience that Piagetian learning is more student-initiative, self-discovery, peer-interactive and learner-friendly than the behaviorism. |
Discussion Wrap-up
Among the four questionswe posted on the Discussion page, two questions are discussed by our peers:
1) The "Theory Question" is a tough one. Yes. You have to understand firstly Piaget's assimilation & accommodation terms and know their relationships with operative and figurative intelligences which are also Piaget's basic conceptions. This makes the discussions more consultative in this topic. Bob helped us to understand that "if assimilation and accommodation are in 'balance with each other' then the child's knowledge will develop in an accurate and concrete manner"; Chenoa gave a good analogy that "assimilation is labeling a folder and putting the information into it, while accomodation is filing the folder, balance would be the ability to file it under several different categories." Ping analyzed that if one cannot balance these two functions, he might either stuck with the old concept or merely creates an isolated new concept unrelated to the old one, therefore he would not construct the transformation between states, not distinguish their commons or differences that might lead him to a higher level of conceptualization. In a word, assimilation & accommodation have to co-exist to make an effective learning. 2) The "Application Question" is easier to engage. Our visitors discussed the necessity and possibility of individual lesson plan for over-capable students. It's concensus that no extra lesson plan is necessary but more flexible teacher and material (content & environment) are required to make the classroom possibly adaptive for staged students. We're a little pity that two other questions are not spread during the limited week. They are both inviting questions and could have spiralled us to a higher level of understanding for Piaget. But we've got a lot, thank you all for contribution! |
Conclusion for Piaget
The week of ETEC512 learning conference is ended. We're happy to conclude here for our journey of Piaget for Piaget.
We started from a quiz at the beginning, hoping to give you a sense of Piaget from daily experiences. It's not an easy fill-in-blank work, you need to accommodate your previous Piaget knowledge in the real cases. You might feel chanllenged or disequlibriated if your answers did not match with the "Answers". Then you should have assimilated intensive new information from the "Theory" and "Application" pages. We embedded there a lot web links for you to explore freely. We tried to discriminate theory details, make comparisons and distinguish limitation & constrains, in that way we hope to compensate for your missed details and make your Piaget construction more accurate and stable. You might have refined your knowledge through the peer interaction in the Discussion threads. Then, if you participated in (or at least observed) our DIY activity, you must gain some valuable direct experiences of how Piaget works in action. And this is another accommodation & assimilation cycle by which we hope to push your cognition to a higher stage. We insist that we should give you this conclusion after the whole week's work, even if it seems like an extra load. We think this is a Piaget way: i.e. every cycle of learning .vs. practice or thinking .vs. discussion will push our cognition upwards spirally, we don't want to wast this half cycle. We've learnt a lot from this group work so far. Thank you very much! We hope you're benefited too. |
One More Thing ...
This website is designed to be presented in a Piaget way. But we know that: cognition is staged, and what seen in our views may not be the same as in your sight. So please help us to improve by reflecting "Which aspects of Piaget are evident or missed in this presentation?"
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