Rasmussen-Eagan Campus
Foundations of Child Development
Hacker, Julie
November 13, 2012
Dear parents, I am Hayley Anderson and I am so pleased to be working with your children! I am 19 years of age and I have been working with young children for about 2 months now and I love every minute of it. I closely align my teaching philosophy with Behaviorism and Social learning theory, by B.F. Skinner and John B. Watson. Learning about all of the different theories I think I best fit along with B.F Skinner and John B. Watson. They had argued that development involves a series of learned behaviors based on an individual’s positive and negative interaction with his or her environment. (Marotz Allen, 2012) I don’t believe in giving into crying children because they will then realize that since they got what they want they are more likely to do the task again later on and still receive the same thing. But then again if you give well to a child they are likely to try harder to improve more later, for example; when a child does good on a spelling test and you tell he or she how well they did, that may motivate them to study even harder the next time. “Children learn both positive and negative behaviors through observation, modeling, or imitation.” (Marotz Allen, 2012) I think that is a great saying because it’s true, a lot of children learn through good and bad. When children see another child or adult doing something they are more likely going to want to do it to and be just like that person. I think children will benefit from the philosophy because I try to support the children as much as possible. Also, when they have done something they weren’t supposed to do, hopefully they learn so they don’t end up doing it again; as Skinner and Watson had previously stated. When working with philosophy’s and PILES, physical, intellectual, language, emotional and social, I thought physical is the most important because children learn the best through
References: Marotz, Allen (2012) Acp ES-EBK for Developmental Profile 2 yrs. (7th Ed) Belmont, CA: Wadsworth