Fourth Random Thing I Love: Piaget
A series intended to distract us all with some randomness, humor, and wonder!
This is the fourth post in a weeklong series intended to be a distraction from the seriousness of the week. (Regular content will return next week.) While my creative bent shows up in much of my other writing, this week I am giving it free rein.
Fourth Random Thing I Love: Piaget
Really? Piaget?
Yes, Jean Piaget. (See his bio here)
Hang on for the videos—they are the best part of this! But this is the background.
I was first and foremost an early childhood educator and my doctoral emphasis was in early childhood/math education. My all-time favorite research was the work Piaget did around children’s ability to conserve size, quantities, and liquids.
Piaget’s conservation tasks are experiments designed to test a child's understanding that certain properties of objects—such as volume, mass, number, or length—remain the same even when their appearance changes. In these tasks, children are shown two identical quantities or objects (like equal amounts of liquid in identical glasses) and then one is altered in a visible way (like pouring the liquid into a taller, narrower glass). Younger children, typically under 7, often judge that the transformed object now has more or less of the property (e.g., "more liquid" in the taller glass), indicating they do not yet understand conservation. Older children begin to grasp that the amount remains the same, demonstrating the development of logical thought in Piaget’s Concrete Operational stage. (ChatGPT Summary)
Though I would lean heavily toward subsequent researchers, the work Piaget did based on observations of his children was pivotal to changing our views of cognitive development.
The small boy in the video answers questions in developmentally correct ways. I used to do this with children with parents in the room and had to ask parents not to correct their children. The child is not wrong—their developing brains cannot yet conserve.
Children cannot conserve size, number, etc. until they are developmentally ready. You can offer experiences, but you cannot teach them to conserve until they are ready.
In this video, the second child has reached the developmental stage that enables her to conserve. She does it perfectly. Just as the child before her demonstrates the pre-conservation stage perfectly.
I would do these tasks regularly with my kindergarten students. The best moment was when a child—who one month before had said one contained more—looked at me as if it was ridiculous for me to even ask the question.
Like many other things, we cannot know something until we know it. I can teach all day long without anyone learning anything. What I cannot do is force a student to learn something they are not ready to learn. We waste a lot of time teaching children things they are not yet ready to learn.
Piaget’s tasks remind me that so much of learning is not in my control but can be accomplished by those curious enough to question their thinking. I love how children at this stage have no shame about believing something different earlier. It doesn't seem to register that they ever thought differently.
I try to remind myself that no one—not a child or an adult—will learn anything unless they are ready to do so. The following saying has been alternately attributed to Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni and the Theosophists: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. My job is not to convince anyone of anything, but to be there when the curious begin to look for other viewpoints.
Life is better if I remember this!
Thanks for spending time with me and my seven things this week. I will be back with #5 tomorrow!