4J The Greats

Piaget, Bruner, and Vygotzky

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Piaget:

Piaget was a biologist who lived from 1896-1934. In that rather short life, he contributed much to our understanding of how children learn. His first profession was that of a biologist. As with most scientist, he had a keen sense of observation and insightful way of questioning what he saw. Children’s thought processes fascinated him and he wanted to know how they ticked. He developed his thoughts around the idea that children first learn in very general terms and then build more complicated schemes. Schemes are how information is organized. For instance, a may have a scheme that says all fuzzy animals with a tail are dogs. Later through a process of disequilibrium, a child learns that not all fuzzy critters are dogs. An accommodation has to be made that includes different schemes for cats and dogs. Piaget also theorized children went through predictable stages of development.

Bruner:

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Jerome Bruner was born in 1915 and is still on faculty at NYU. He believed much like Piaget in that everyone tried to categorize everything so that they can make sense of it. They did this through three different ‘modes’:  enactive where learning is through the act of doing, iconic where learning is through visually making sense symbols such as the written word and finally there is symbolic where learning is through reasoning, logic and abstract thinking. A wonderful thing about his theory is it states that the learner actively builds their knowledge through social construction. This process can be helped along through a questioning method referred to the Socratic Method. He also advocated what is called spiraling, revisiting curriculum in more and more complex terms. 

Vygostsky:

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Lev Vygotsky lived from 1896-1934. One of his central ideas was that of ‘the zone of proximal development’. It states that each person has a certain potential to their ability to learn that can be greatly affected by cultural and social connections. He said that even though learning should be directed by someone with a certain level of expertise, it is not limited to only that arena. Learning can take place from peers and other people. In fact, learning can also be reinforced when a learner helps another peer.