Child Development Theories

Learning and development theories are conceptual frameworks that are looked at how information is absorbed, processed and retained during learning. Through using different learning theories you are able to teach children in the classroom and develop and strengthen them as a person not only intellectually but socially as well. Theories provide information that can help teachers influence children’s learning by providing developmentally appropriate practice. In practice theories help to improve, enable, inform, provide for and explain, but too many theories can create a very confusing picture.
Neuroscientists believed that the genes we are born with determine the structure of our brains and that with the fixed structure determines the way
The children responded well to this by wanting to complete the more challenging work and you would hear them say they wanted to ‘grow their brains’. This was really pleasing to see as you could see children who wanted to learn and wanted to grow their own mindset. The children were more positive about their own learning and really enjoyed challenging themselves in order to grow their own brains.
There were the children however that didn’t think they needed to challenge themselves as they already thought they were smart enough and knew everything. These children really didn’t like it when they were wrong and really saw themselves as a failure to the point they would get upset. This really reflected what Carol Dweck had said about fixed mindsets and how they see themselves as failures unlike growth mindset where they would just learn from it and see it as a challenge of how they can improve their work next time. This is something the children would do at the end of each lesson. They would write themselves a challenge at the bottom of their work of how they would improve their work next
Doing this right and inspiring the children to think with the growth mindset can really help children to develop more than they thought they could. I wish this was something that I had been introduced to in primary school as I may of challenged myself more and wouldn’t of not completed work I found to be too ‘hard’ for myself to complete. Going forward I set myself the challenge of reading and researching this theory more and going forward onto my next placement think of ways I could slowly introduce this when I am teaching a class and see if the results really do reflect how I feel this theory does work.
Behaviourism is another theory that is widely used with in primary schools day in and day out. Behaviourism (which is also known as stimulus-response) is based upon the simple notion of a relationship between a stimulus and a response, which is why behaviourist theories are often referred to as stimulus-response theories. Behaviour can be controlled with rewards and sanctions, rules or expectations and the role of the teacher and their own