Chapter 3

(3.1) Personal and social development can have a major influence on both individual student

learning and the learning environment as a whole. Identify a case from the CSEL guidelines*

that you would like to address in your paper. Then, examine the possible developmental

factors that could be influencing your target student(s) or classroom in the case study. Consider

all dimensions of personal and social development, including cognitive, language, social,

emotional, and moral development. *CSEL guidelines can be found under CSEL Artifact. Cases

are included at the end of the document. Choose the case that best suits your desired grade level.

You have started to dread your fifth period music class.  It is made up entirely of seniors who are counting the days until graduation and seem to care very little about learning.  Most of the students are obviously members of one clique or another.  Whenever they think your back is turned, they start passing notes and text messaging.  Worse, three boys have started disrupting those engaged in learning.  No matter what you say, they laugh at the students who sing tenor and soprano, especially when they are practicing their parts.  Yesterday, Tony, Jeff, and Morris started rough housing then all three of them refused to sit down and follow the class procedures that the classroom community agreed upon at the beginning of the year. Although you have been using a set approach to handling infractions of rules, you decide it is time to change these procedures.

There could be a few things going on in this situation.  For one theory it could be that the boys are going through cognitive dissonance which Piaget referred to as disequilibrium (Ormrod, 2011, 400).  A second theory could be that one boy is having this cognitive dissonance while the two other boys are in a state of peer pressure and they then follow along with the original instigator (Ormrod, 2011, 76).  At this age and state it appears that the boys are just trying to find where they belong and their method of discovering themselves has produced this current behavior.  The boys may consider themselves to be “cool” by acting in this manner while excluding other students or they could be trying to present themselves as being “cool” in order to impress other students with hopes of being able to join or feel like they then fit in with that other peer group that they are desiring to be a member.  

(3.22) Check out tables 3.1 (p. 75), 3.2 (p. 83) and 3.3 (p. 91) with particular attention to the age

ranges you are interested in teaching. Identify your personal favorite ways that an educator can

promote a child’s sense of self, perspective taking, and moral reasoning skills.

I really like how they suggest to “give students opportunities to examine and experiment with a variety of adult like roles” (Ormrod, 2011, 75).  If you provide a student with an outlet and help them to see how they can behave in this new manner then they can express their feelings in a better format.  Also I highly agree that you need to “Explore the possible origins of people’s perspectives and motives in discussions of real and fictional events” (Ormrod, 2011, 83).  If you can understand their feelings and where they come from then you can work on altering this structure to better the individual and their presentation of themselves as a better individual.  I would definitely want to address “moral issues in social studies, science and literature” with my students and by “encouraging performing community service” and “having them reflect on their experiences through group discussions or written essays” I think they will be able to have a better understanding about the world as a whole (Ormrod, 2011, 91).