Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

There has been great debate over which teaching styles and methods maximize educational results.  Many studies have proven that typical methods implemented in schools throughout the United States are in fact obsolete.  There are many shortcomings of the elementary education within the US, and after reading chapter 12 I feel that there are many changes that can be recommended to improve these shortcomings.

One of the main disadvantages found in a typical US classroom is that the environment and setting is very dissimilar from that in the real world.  Often, children will learn things that seem pointless because the lesson’s goals are to teach content that allow students pass mandatory statewide tests.  I feel that to reverse this outcome, children should be presented a big picture idea through hands on methods that will enlist an understanding and appreciation for a skill or practice.  In addition, teachers can implement Play World Practice, by enacting, discussing, making art, and playing with themes based on works of children literature.  This will cause students to be less discouraged and their learning with be fueled by motivation, allowing for a maximization of results.

The settings of US classrooms are too uniform and dissuade the importance of teamwork.  Students are placed with peers the same age while interacting with the teacher through instructional discourse; they are expected to do the majority of their work individually, fearing the punishments of cheating.  It has been proven that working with a diverse community allows for learning to foster.  Therefore, I believe that at least once a week, elementary schools should set up programs where children are taken out of their classroom and paired with students of different ages and locations, to work together and solve various problems.  This will allow for the exchanging of ideas through teamwork and will present students with opinions that they normally would not have been obtainable in their usual class.

Another inadequacy is the recitation script, which uses of the initiation reply feedback sequence, because it is rarely encountered in the everyday world.  When discussing the recitation script on page 436, the Text Book states, “Among other shortcomings, children taught in this manner are placed in the role of passive recipients of predigested information, and therefore gain very little practice in formulating and solving problems for themselves.“  Many argue that an efficient alternative of the recitation script would be reciprocal teaching because it integrates bottom up and top down processing through small group discussions at a time of reading.  This method of teaching maximizes results and allows children to hear and see the teacher and their peers’ model metacognitive behaviors that aid comprehension.  Recitation Script creates an increase in reading skills, while simultaneously increasing the knowledge of important subject matter, because it is said to be an application of Vygotsky’s view of the “zones of proximal development.”  Reciprocal teaching asks children to participate in the act of reading for meaning even before they’ve acquired abilities that individual reader requires.

Unfortunately, there are many shortcomings present in US classrooms and there is great room for improvement.  The textbook states on page 439 “Overall, the evidence indicates that when properly organized, instructional methods that induce students to be active contributors to classroom discourse can be quite effective.  But such methods are more complex to organize than the recitation script, and are still encountered in only a minority of classrooms.”