Jean Piaget's Theories

Jean Piaget, is a psychologist who has influenced many teaching techniques through his research, his view based on how he believes children's minds work and develops. Piaget's main. Focus was on the process of a child's thinking and the active role of the learner, this particular study has been very influential particularly in education theory. Piaget gave a particular insight into the children simply growing up and looking at the children's capacity to understanding their world. Piaget believes children and their ways of thinking doesn't develop entirely and doesn't show a smooth pattern, Piaget believes there are points to each stage moving into new areas as they develop and investigate the world around them. he also believes these insights

Skinner, and Albert Bandura contributed greatly to the behaviourist perspective of development. Behaviourists believe the child’s environment shapes learning and behaviour of each individual child like our human behaviour, development, and learning are thought of as reactions to the environment around us. This perspective leads many families, schools, and educators to assume that young children develop new knowledge by reacting to their surroundings.
Many teachers and parents believe that young children learn best by role activities, such as reciting the alphabet over and over, copying letters, and tracing numbers.
In the classrooms this shows effective as young children are expected to sit at tables and listen to their teachers speak or write on a white board. This behaviourists approach to learning suggests that behaviour is learned from environmental factors, reward and punishment. For example, if you touched a flame from a candle and it burns you then you will learn almost straight away not to touch the flame again because you know that you will get burned. Behaviourists often call this conditioning. An example given by Skinner -"This was demonstrated in John B Watson’s famous experiment where he used a small boy called little Albert and created a phobia of rats in him". This type of conditioning is not used in real practice with children as it does not help to have an understanding of phobias in children such as big bangs

This theory suggested that people had basic needs that had to be met before they could fulfil their own potential. In practice professionals are to ensure that the environment they create for children is one that meets basic needs such as: Physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem needs and self-actualization. Also, professionals must strive to build a strong relationship so that children can fulfil their potential. The Hierarchy of needs shows that one must satisfy lower levels of basic needs before they can progression to meet higher levels of needs. Once these needs have been reasonably met, you may be able to reach the highest level of the pyramid called