What do I Know About Adolescent/Child Development?

​What I know, learned, and am learning about adolescent/child development is that each individual child has unique differences in development. Of course, development issues could be predisposition due to learning disabilities, which have to be adapted to in a case-to-case situation. After birth adolescent/child development can be altered due to the environment in which they are raised. Also, children have multiple techniques for absorbing information more efficiently; Visual, auditory, or tactile would be some examples.

With the understanding of all the different facets each individual child has for learning, I base my teaching philosophy around providing variety. In the article Student-Centered Instruction: Integrating the Learning Sciences to Support Elementary and Middle School Learners, author Steven Turner (2011) describes the learning sciences. Specifically from his article that relates to my philosophy, is the framework of How People Learn (Turner, 2011, pg. 2). The way I present material, the way I assess knowledge obtained, the way I set the classroom tone, has to continuously evolve to meet the student’s needs. Our role as educators is not to take the easy route and always teach and assess the same way, but it is to evolve and reassess our own methods of teaching because each child in the room is changing continuously.

Turner S. (2011) Student-Centered Instruction: Integrating the Learning Sciences to Support Elementary and Middle School Learners. Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.