Jean Piaget's Theory

Piaget’s Theory
On August 9, 1896, Jean Piaget was born into this world not knowing he was going to be such an influence on the educational world today. “It is possible to give a rough definition of Piaget’s principal scientific concerns in a single sentence: he is primarily interested in the theoretical and experimental investigation of the qualitative development of intellectual structures” (Flavell, 1963, p. 15). Piaget was a theorist who placed an emphasis on the development of social behavior and nature as they contributed to cognitive development. When looking at cognitive development, you are focusing on problem-solving and how it develops throughout childhood.
Piaget was a major believer in children adapting to their environment.

He believed that children’s minds had to mature and could not take on certain tasks until they are mentally developed enough to do so. The first stage he determined was the sensory motor stage, which occurs in children from birth to age two. In this stage, Piaget’s ideas are focused on how children see things and interpret it. In the book Children and Adolescents, Elkind explained how Piaget began to understand this stage by observing his child, Jacqueline. “To illustrate, Piaget observed that when he held a cigarette case in front of his daughter and then dropped it, she did not follow the trajectory of the case but continued looking at his hand” (p. 18). Towards the end of this stage, Piaget began to see improvement in the way his child reads different situations. Jacqueline was able to discover where the objects went when Piaget removed them from clear

One beneficial way Piaget’s theory helps the children is it creates an environment of support for the students. This is a key point in Piaget’s cognitive theory which is called scaffolding. Scaffolding is a teaching style that provides assistant from peers, teachers and family members. This allows students to be assisted by well-educated adults, or peers, to provide clear direction and decrease students’ confusion. Another useful technique Piaget’s theory is being used in the classroom is group activities. He wanted students to be more involved with hands on activities, social interaction and to explore different scenarios of the environment when it came to learning. In the article, Duckworth gives an example of how Piaget wanted kids to interact and experiment with each