Child Development Theories

There is no one correct answer or formula when it comes to child development. Children are individually unique in their own ways and develop at different rates and in different types of ways. I have established a lens theory. This theory depicts that teachers must use and “put on” different types of lenses in order to fully help student development. These four theories of Erikson, Piaget, Vygotsky, and Maslow are just four of the lenses that teachers could use in order to foster child learning and development. The Erikson lens can be helpful when children are trying to configure their own “resourceful self”. If a child is struggling with creating their “resourceful self”, you may want to take a look at look at the first four strengths that occur during childhood to see if they are working together or not. For example if a student is struggling with competence, you may want to look at their development of the purpose strength. Without purpose, competence seems pretty useless. Therefor as a teacher, if a child is not understanding most things, you may want to take a look to see if they understand the purpose of why they are at school which can lead to them gaining a competence because they know what all this is for now.

Now let’s put on a Piaget lens to think about student development on a cognitive level. The concept of my theory isn’t saying that this is always the correct lens to help develop students through the cognitive domain but it can certainly be a tool to look to help find the answer. This theory established that students pass through the cognitive domain in stages that are based on age. Now this lens can get a little foggy due to the wide range of appropriate developmental levels there are. Students often can show characteristics from a stage above before they are complete with the previous stages. This can often cause teachers to think that they are done developing with certain aspects of the previous stages. Therefor as a teacher you may want to use...