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Philosophy of Child Development Essay

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Through my studies of Early Childhood Education, I have come to form my own philosophy on child development. In HCCF 467: Philosophies and Theories of Child Development, I took the Teacher Belief Inventory which assisted me in expressing my individual philosophy on child development. This inventory is a list of 30 statements for which you rate how strongly you agree or disagree. A number of points are given to each answer given, and then these scores are added up in three categories: cognitive-developmental, cultural-training/behaviorist, and maturationist-socialization. According to the inventory, if your scores are less than 10 points apart, the teacher is not a strong adherent of any position. None of my scores were more than 10 points …show more content…

The children were involved in a variety of activities which allowed them to experience the bugs hands on. They were involved in the process of picking out their bugs and studying them. The amount of information they were able to remember was displayed the next day when the class was able to tell a classmate, who was absent during the activities, all about bugs. When it came time to assess the children on their knowledge of bugs, the children who were involved in the activities were able to identify more than the child who was absent, even after she was told about bugs. I believe that children need to be engaged in hands on learning experiences in order to assimilate new information. I think that children take in information the way Piaget described with assimilation, accommodation, and organization. Children are taking in new information everyday. The way they process the information is through taking it in and associating it with information they already know. After exploring the information, they accommodate or construct new ideas about the information. Afterwards, they organize the information into systems they can understand (Santrock, 2005). Another statement I strongly agreed with came from the maturationist-socialization category. “Teacher initiates and/or directs activity appropriate to the child’s level” (Peters, Niesworth, & Yankey, 1985)

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