Observing Billy through Piagetian and Vygotskian developmental theory

¶ … Piagetian theory

The child that I observed was a kindergartener named Billy. According to Piaget, children at Billy's age are in the preoperational stage of development. "During this stage, young children are able to think about things symbolically. Their language use becomes more mature. They also develop memory and imagination, which allows them to understand the difference between past and future, and engage in make-believe. But their thinking is based on intuition and still not completely logical. They cannot yet grasp more complex concepts such as cause and effect, time, and comparison" (Piaget's stages of development, 2013, WebMD). Billy's developing imaginative capacity is evidenced in his 'play' stacking and destroying walls made of available cardboard boxes while making noises that suggest explosions. After engaging in this for some time with a fellow student Billy then switched to assembling jigsaw puzzles. Although Billy was able to correctly assemble the puzzles, he eventually mixed up the pieces and tried to make a new puzzle with the available mixed sections. To Piaget this would indicate that Billy can replicate putting a puzzle together but does not fully understand that each puzzle is made up of unique shapes that can only be assembled correctly together.

During the preoperational stage, children tend to be very egocentric. "Children view things that are happening around them in only one point-of-view," namely their own (Presnell 1999). This egocentrism can be seen in Billy's occasional disruptive behavior, when he was biting and kicking another student to 'get his way.' Billy was unable to empathize with the other student's perspective. Nor was he able to empathize with other students who might want to assemble the jigsaw puzzles as he did, but could not now Billy had mixed up the pieces.

Observation: Vygotsky's theory

In contrast to Piaget's theory of development, which stresses that development occurs in a series of sequential stages that are relatively regimented, Vygotsky viewed development as a socially-constructed process. Children model their behaviors on others: peers and adults. Although cognitive capacity does limit behavior to some extent, "much important learning by the child occurs through social interaction with a skillful tutor" (McLeod 2007). Viewed as such, Billy's role-playing of building and destroying the wall was likely imitative of a television program he had seen. Similarly, his assembly of a jigsaw puzzle was based upon viewing how other people assembled such puzzles in the past, combined with his own trial and error of assembly. Through creative play, Billy is learning that jigsaw puzzles must be kept separate from one another and are not interchangeable. "The Zone of Proximal Development as the area where the most sensitive instruction or guidance should be given - allowing the child to develop skills they will then use on their own - developing higher mental functions" (McLeod 2007). Ideally, the teacher can guide the student, building upon their existing skills to learn concepts such as spatial relationships more quickly than the child could independently. Ideally, the teacher should have used Billy's interactions with the puzzle as a 'teachable moment' to guide him to understand the notion of interlocking puzzle pieces that could not be combined.