Ch. 2 QtC's

I cannot assume that all the high school students in my English classroom will have achieved Piaget’s developmental stage of formal operational stage. In fact, Piaget concedes that some adults never even reach this stage. For those who are not yet at the stage, I will need to exert patience and spend extra time working with them. I can model my own cognitive processes in front of the class to display the way one would go about thinking through the dilemma or complex issue. For example, if a student cannot grasp logic “if then” scenarios, I could walk through the way my mind solves the problem verbally, or in a visual diagram on the board. In regards to books, students who have not reached this stage may also have difficulty imagining a fantastic story plot, or putting themselves in the shoes of unusual characters, or understanding metaphors or symbolism. In this case, I believe it will be extremely effective to have peers who have reached this developmental stage model their own thinking processes to the students who have not.

After looking over Table 2.2 for grades 9-12, I began to think about how I can incorporate activities which will encourage language development in this age group. Especially if I teach in an urban setting, there will be a great need for the “language” of middle class and professionalism to be explicitly taught to students who may only hear the slang of their socio-economic class and culture. I want to impress that like it or not, there is a certain “dialect” that is expected in different situations, such as job interviews or in college. I could do an activity where I put the differences between classes out in the open and allow my students to say whatever they think about higher classes than them. Then we could “translate” a passage full of slang or terms they would know into “middle class, professional” language. It would be okay if the activity was slightly humorous. As an English teacher, several of the other strategies are necessarily a part of the classroom, such as exploring complex syntactic structures or consider the underlying meanings and messages in poetry and fiction.  I am looking forward to being able to aid in guiding my students’ language development.