Preface

Effective education requires an understanding of students. As a future educator, it is important to know how your students think and learn. This means knowing the material that they are capable of learning and not learning and the mistakes that they are likely to make along the road to mastery. Which mathematical concepts, for example, will first-graders have acquired on their own and which will you need to teach them? What roadblocks will they and you face? You also must know how your students will relate to you and to their classmates. Will the 3- and 4-year-olds in your preschool class, for example, be able to cooperate and play games that have rules? You also will need to be aware of the personal concerns your students face in the classroom and -- increasingly in today's society -- out of the classroom (e.g., at home, in their neighborhoods). How will an eighth-grade student's performance in class, for example, be affected by the fact that she and her family have just been evicted from their apartment and forced to live in a homeless shelter? You, as an educator, also must be ready to recognize the differences as well as the commonalities among the students in your class. Will white students and ethnic minority students, for example, come to your class with the same preparation and expectations? Will your own experiences and upbringing affect your ability to ensure that both types of students succeed? And finally, you must be prepared to recognize students who have exceptional academic strengths or weaknesses. What does it mean to have a cognitive disability, for instance? What does it mean to be gifted?

In an attempt to help future educators understand their students better, most teacher education programs require completion of one or more course on human development. These courses sometimes focus on particular age periods, such as early childhood or adolescence, or they may span the entire life course from infancy through old age. These courses may be organized around chronological age periods -- for example, future educators may first learn about infants, then about preschool children, then school-age children, and so on -- or they may be organized around substantive domains -- for example, future educators may first learn about physical and motor development, then about cognitive development, and finally, about social and personality development. Whatever their focus, however, the goal of these courses is to increase future educators' knowledge of human physical, psychological, and behavioral development so that they will have a better understanding of the strengths, limitations, and needs of their students.

Future educators who complete such courses acquire considerable knowledge of human development and thus, knowledge of their future students. Nevertheless, these future educators often find themselves asking questions such as:

"I understand what Piaget meant by assimilation and accommodation but how do I help my third graders assimilate and accommodate?"

"Vygotsky said that we must identify each child's zone of proximal development. How do I do that? And then what do I teach the student?

"It was interesting to learn that adults talk in simplified ways to children and that this helps them learn language. But how simply should I talk to fifth-graders?"

"We learned about all the detrimental effects of poverty on children's development. But what can I do to help a homeless 10-year-old in my class? I only see him or her for a few hours a day?"

"I know that culture is important. It makes us different. Will my cultural background prevent me from being an effective teacher of ethnic minority students? Can I ever understand what they need and what they can offer?"

"I was saddened when I read about children who are rejected by their peers. These kids are at such high risk for so many problems, and they must feel so all alone. But what can I do in my classroom to help them? I can't force the other kids to play with them."

"I understand that motivation is important. I even remember all the different kinds of motivation... like intrinsic and extrinsic. But how can I motivate a bunch of third graders to memorize their multiplication tables? It's boring and that's all there is to it."

"It was fascinating to learn about all the issues adolescents face as they begin to define themselves and their future professional and personal paths. It's a really important time. I'm a little worried that when I teach high school I simply won't know how to help them resolve their identity crises in the best ways...In fact, I don't even know if it's good to help them. Do they need to figure it on their own?"

What is it that they these future educators are asking? What is it that they need but do not get in their human development courses? We believe that these future educators are asking about connections -- connections between research on human development and classroom practice. These connections simply are not made in most textbooks available for use in human development courses. The typical human development text helps future educators understand what their students will be like, but these texts have little to say about how to translate this new found knowledge into actual teaching practices. In fact, effective teaching requires more than knowledge of human development. Effective teaching also requires the ability to devise strategies that take advantage of that knowledge -- strategies for connecting research and practice. That is why we have written this textbook.