Teaching the Concrete Operational Child

The Concrete Opratational stage (7 - 11 years old) was considered by Jean Peaget as one of the most important stages in child’s cognitive development. This stage marks the biginning of logical and operational thoughts in childhood. Besides, the child is mature enough to use logical skills as weel their thinking is more organized and rational. Moreover, Jean Peaget’s theories influence in many different ways. It is important to take into account  to integrate direct tasks and activities which make a sucessful lesson plan, in order to help our learners develop Concrete Operational  as an essential  stage in childhood.

 

Furthermore, it is fundamental for we, language teachers take account Behavior Management when teaching children. As we already know, children demonstrate different behaviors in the classroom so that teachers have to know how to deal with and to know what is causing a certain behavior in children. For that reason, it is also important that teachers have knowledge about what the Typical Attention Span is, in order to think and integrate  meaningful activities into the lesson plan and to get advantage when our students are focused.

 

Typical Attention Span: When trying to estimate realistically how much time a child can focused on one activity.

 

In order to know the Typicl Attention Span for our students, we can use the following formula:  

(cronological age + 1) e.g  8 years old + 1 = 9 minutes
 

It is important to mention that if we provide long tasks to our students, they will get bored and they will behave inappropiately. Behavior in children look to satisfy  a necesity due to they not have the words necessary to express themselves. For this reason,  when a child behaves inappropiate, teachers should first try to identify the cause or necesity of the behavior that child is showing.

Accoding to Choice Theory by William Glasser, all behavior is motivated by an individual’s internal desire to satify basic physical and psychological needs:

 

• Love and belonging
• Freedom
• Power
• Fun

In addition, we language teachers should view child’s inappropiate behavior as a teaching opportunity to teach the child to make good chooices and that he is responsible for his actions. Teachers can teach about responsibility and appropiate behavior by providing students with choices and by setting clear boundaries.

 

 A boundary is present as a positive point that will happen when the child behaves appropiately.

 

• Be specific and clearly communicated.
• Respect the needs of the tutor and the child.
• Be set before problems occurs.
• Focus on the positive outcome.

 

 

It is important to keep in mind that teachers will not be able to teach the children responsibility or get them to make appropiate choices by using threats or conditions, losing their tempers, installing fear or being permissive. Moreover, teaching styles play an important role in the classroom. It is not possible to demand that teachers always be authoritative, as opposed to authoritarian or permissive. These teaching styles are based on two concepts: control and involvement with students.

 

 

Teaching Style Characterics

 

Permissive teachers

 

• Theacher are popular, but have a low control threshold.
• They make few demands.
• They generally show aphaty toward students progress.

  

Authoritarian teachers

 

• They are antithesis of permissive supervisors.
• They set out insuperable barriers to students – teacher involment.
• Their roles are copious and enforced.
• Encourages little interaction.
• Establishes fervent competition among students.

 

Authoritative teachers

 

• Manages the best of both worlds with regard to control and students involvement.
• Mantains not only high behavioral expectations but also classroom rigor and relationship.
• He usually encorages interactions and is warm and inviting to students.
• He is open and friendly, even though his boundaries are clearly stablished.
• He is a steady and reale role model.

 

To conclude, it is really important that teachers know how the Concrete Operational stage works in childhood and the characteristics in order to integrate different activities into a lesson plan that help students to develoment cognitive skills. Besides, it is essential for teachers know how to manage behaviors in the classroom and take advantages from, those behaviors in order to teach our learners to become responsible. Finally,. Even though authoritative teachers result to be the ideal model in classroom, we can mix the different teaching styles according to students needs.