Disequilibrium in Learning Piaget's Concept of Disequilibrium

Disequilibrium in Learning Piaget's concept of disequilibrium in learning makes a great deal of sense both in terms of child development and in terms of the general way in which humans tend to think and act. Piaget bases much of his theories on evolutionary biology, and so adaptation necessarily plays a certain role in his thinking.

He theorizes that the student is always active and that learning is an action by which one constructs knowledge (hence consctructivism), but that at the same time humans tend towards stagnation, seeking to "continue in past patterns as long as possible" (Doll, 1993, p. 83) Piaget supposes that it is necessary for the teacher to create a sort of cognitive dissonance and discomfort which will shock the student out of their complacency and force them to evolve and learn.

He calls this state of uneasiness which is necessary to learning "disequilibrium." The social aspect of disequilibrium, and it's idea of learning as a somewhat uncomfortable state seem to have many resonances in the works of others such as Vygotsky and also in regular personal experience. Piaget's theories are especially powerful in as much as they do draw directly from biological theories. The idea that disequilibrium creates learning is in many ways drawn from the idea that biological changes and threatening forces instigate adaptation and evolution.

Piaget applies to the mind what biologists have always applied to the greater forces of life. So a student can be seen to be in microcosm a complex genetic chain of organic life, as it were, struggling to survive and adapt in response to the world around it. The social aspect of Piaget's theory comes in when the social structure (eg, the teacher or fellow students or whoever is serving to create this disequilibrium) creates a threat to the "survival" of a line of thought or reasoning.

In essence, the teacher serves as an evolved predator or a suddenly more-skillful prey, whose maneuvers force the strudent to adapt in order to continue to avoid being eaten or to be able to eat. The same force that allows life forms to adapt to their surroundings allows students to adapt their thinking to the new challenges posed by teachers.

So just as a panther may force deer to evolve a more effective way or running or a new herd structure, so social interaction may force the student to learn a quicker line of thought or a new way of interacting. Vygotsky, who approached development from a very Marxist point-of-view, was expecially invested in the social aspect of learning. It was his belief that social interactions was "inherently integrated with social and emotional development" (Forman & McPhail, 1993, p. 215&216).

He spoke extensively about the way in which children have two levels of learning, both the level at which they are capable of operating on their own, and what he called the "zone of proximinal development" which is the level at which the child can operate if they have help. This help, and the conditioning and environment provided by the child's native language and cultural structure were for Vygotsky vital in determining how learning would proceed.

If students were joined with someone with a higher base level of learning, they could learn more about subjects in the zone of proximinal development, and could progress more quickly. The real difference between Piaget and Vygotsky was focus. One could integrate their ideas relatively successfully, by saying that the zone which Vygotsky portrays is also the level at which disequilibrium is created by coming in contact with the more advanced thoughts of the teacher or advanced student.

However, while Vygotsky focused mainly on the social aspects, giving a n explanation of how learning works, Piaget focused on the personal aspects and explained why social learning works. Piaget's theories are not just fancy hypothesis about the way in which imaginary children should learn, if evolutionary biology applied to the human mind. They actually apply very directly and obviously to real-world learning experiences. I know that in my own personal learning experiences, disequilibrium has always been a powerful motivator.

One perfect example of this was when I first learned Algebra. One must remember that in lower grades, the teachers are always misleading about how to solve equations. They will present a problem such as 3 + [box] = 7, and ask that the student figure out what number goes in the blank. The student is instructed to use trial and error to guess different numbers, try adding them up, and seeing which number added to 3 will equal 7.

After a while, one learns to be able to guess very quickly through a process of elimination and a familiarity with the addition tables. Later this moves on to the multiplication and division tables with questions such as 3 / [box] = 9, and so forth. Still, the student is instructed to guess. Well, when I was still at that trial-and-error stage, I was having a great deal of difficulty with my homework. It would take hours to guess that answers to so many questions.

One day, a babysitter volunteered to help, and told me something along these lines: to find the answers to your questions, substitute X for the box. Then the question becomes 3 + x = 7. Then try to get the X alone on one side so you can see what it equals. So subtract the 3 from the 7, and then you'll have X=4, which is your answer. In short, I was taught Algebra. This cheating shocked me. I was thrown completely off balance because I realized my teachers had lied to me.

There was, in fact, a way to solve these problems without guessing. When I returned to school, my teachers continued to insist that this way wouldn't work, and that guessing was the only way. This resulted in a period of deep confusion -- like Piaget's disequilibrium. Only as I gradually continued to test the idea of "getting X alone on a side" in a multitude of settings through-out my.