Chapter 2

Once I began teaching a classroom of my own I will not be able to assume that everyone of my student's has achieved formal operations stage. His theory does not allow for much diversity in classroom abundance, which I am assured there is. While I do believe every student will hopefully reach the point at some point in their lives of achieving the formal operational stage, I believe it can be delayed severely. This could be in part due to Vygotsky's own theory of cognitive development. I believe that biological and social factors have a huge part in reaching these stages, so these will need to be addressed in the classroom if a child appears to be delayed. I believe this could be a huge factor in my classroom teaching if I teach in an urban or low socioeconomic status school because students in these types of settings are often not exposed to many resources. In order to help combat this problem, I believe this issue will need to be addressed first. This might include surrounding and teaching students concepts that they have never before been exposed to, and making special attention to explain these confusing concepts to them. Once this issue has been addressed we could then see if the delay is still occurring in the formal operational stage. If there is, I would be sure to incorporate cognitive processes into my everyday lessons through modeling myself, and peer work. Perhaps once students see how to arrive at solutions through this, they may begin to attempt that same thinking process that they have seen work. Also, when being an English teacher, it is clear that language will play a huge role in my classroom. Therefore, choosing strategies to incorporate linguistic characteristics in my classroom should not be hard. Through reading novels, short stories, and poetry students will be exposed to new vocabulary everyday. They will learn what many of this words mean through not only context clues, but discussion as a class to reinforce the use of them, as well as remember the meaning. This also goes for any underlying means we discover in the text. Students will learn to "read between the lines" in stories once we discuss the meaning of numerous scenes from our stories as a class.