Examining Educational Theorists and Current Practice Today Essay

Examining Educational Theorists and Current Practice Today Abstract This paper names three educational theorists, Benjamin Bloom, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, and seeks to examine their most well-known theories. These are namely, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Each theory is briefly explained and then compared and contrasted with the other theories. Lastly, the author reflects on the practical application of these theories in a classroom setting, discussing how these philosophies fit into the author’s current practice. Can anyone with a thought, idea, or theory about a topic be considered a theorist? Those who are formally named as theorists in educated circles seem to be people who have spent time pondering a particular subject, topic, or issue and then shared his or her thoughts with others of that field, eventually following up with testing and publication. In that same vein, are not those who study and work in those fields, albeit perhaps unpublished and unrecognized, pondering the inner workings of that field also considered theorists? When it comes to education, there are those who through publication have shared their theories regarding its purposes, processes, effects, etc, and then there are those who perform its’ necessary tasks daily. The latter learn about the former as part of undergraduate courses in education but are seldom asked to carry out these theories farther than a pencil-paper test. This graduate level course has asked, in the form of this paper, for s tudents who are at work in the field of education to re-examine several of these theorists, comparing and contrasting their pu... ...onal Bureau of Education. Vol: XXX, No. 3. www.ibe.unesco.org/Internaional/Publications/ThinkersPdf/bloome.pdf Gallagher, C. (n.d.) Psychology history: Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky http://fates.cns.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/vygotsky.htm Major categories in the taxonomy of educational objectives (Bloom, 1956). http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom.html MIA: encyclopedia of marxism: glossary of people: vy (Vygotsky, Lev.). www.marxists.org/glossary/people/v/y.htm Presnell, F. (n.d.) Psychology history: Jean Piaget. http://fates.cns.muskingum.edu/~psych/psycweb/history/piaget.htm Schutz, R. (2002, March). Vygotsky and language acquisition. www.sk.com/sk-vygot.html Smith, L. (2000, November). A brief biography of Jean Piaget. The Jean Piaget Society: society for the study of knowledge and development. www.piaget.org/aboutPiaget.html