Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development are Sensorimotor, Preoperational, Concrete Operational, and Formal Operational. He states that everyone goes through each one of the stages as they mature through life. The first stage, sensorimotor, they child is just trying to figure out what is going on around them. They use the skills that they were born with to analyze the world around them. In the preoperational stage, the child begins to use their imagination to learn new things. However, they are unable to understand logic. When a student is in the concrete operational stage, they are able to use logic to figure things out, but are still unable to use abstract thinking. The last stage, formal operational, usually sets in around age twelve and we stay in this stage throughout adulthood. In this stage, we are able to think abstractly and we need less "hands on" type activities to learn new skills.

After reading about Piaget's stages of development, I realized that in order for my students to gain the most from my teaching, I need to keep in mind these stages. I currently teach pre-k through second grade and I understand now that I need to show my students what the skills that I am teaching them, look like. For example, I was teaching them how to jump rope and I told them to swing the rope and then jump through it. All of the students that had not jumped rope before, turned the rope, let it sit on the floor, then jumped through it. I finally showed that they needed to keep the rope turning while they jumped and I had more of those students that were able to perform that skill after they watched me.

I believe that we, as teachers, need to be careful with this concept because we could focus on the stages too much. Just because a student is a certain age, does not mean that they will be able to process material in the way these stages describe. There are too many variables to set these stages in concrete while teaching our students. I do feel that these stages are a great tool and could be a foundation that we can use to educate the students, we just need to make sure that we are flexible and teach in other ways to maximize student learning.