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In a dance class, Bruner’s concrete to abstract type of learning can be used. I’m an elementary school setting, we can explore improvisation. Since these will be regular kids that you’re working with, you’ll have to give them ideas to help them encourage their movement. You’ll also have to make them feel comfortable and make them understand that they’re in a safe place. You can give them words for them to interpret through their movement. In other words, they’ll dance out the word to express the word through their movement. For example, if I shout out the word “sad,” they have to express what sad is through their movement and their facial expressions. Then, after going through different emotions for them to express through their movement, they will then be able to watch some videos of professional dancers expressing those emotions. For example, if we were exploring the word “sad”, I will give them a video of Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre’s Judith Jamison performing Cry. After this, they’ll be able to understand how to express that emotion further through their movement. They can have a journal to write down their notes about what they’ve experienced.

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Vygotsky thought in line with marxist theorists like Althusser and consequently developed learning pedagogies that matched  the United States' capitalistic goal in education. It makes our job easier in a big way because whether we like it or not, it's the world we are helping the next generation to conquer, (aka solve the problems of humankind.)
In the simple concept of sign systems, symbols that cultures create help people think, create and solve problems, also inextricably binds us to culture through socio-linguistics. It makes us think we're part of something universal.
As a SECA, I worked with a student who was having trouble pushing through his assignments due to really big feelings he had, particularly about math.  Because he had trouble managing his emotions, he was stuck at the frustration level when his classmates were able to move on. I was the teacher to support the instructional level work.  My job was to convince my student that he could do it independently.
I thought he almost had the ability to break this cycle, but because he had trouble managing his emotions, the work was beyond his zone of proximal development.
When I allowed him to work with a desk mate, he had an easier time with his work.  His social interactions helped him cognitively, because he was too distracted by a friendly desk-mate to focus on his frustration.
All of us in his classroom community were helping him just by proxy since his social interactions were so positive.  His outward experience of school matched the internalized social schema he's been developing.
Funny enough Vygotsky calles the internalization of signs self-regulation which is exactly what my student was learning to do with his emotions.

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A dance lesson in elementary school can follow the concrete to abstract model. Student's would begin with enactive representation, learning basic steps. The steps can even be related to real world movements already familiar to students like walking, stomping, reaching and crawling. Then, students can draw and/or look at images that represent the movements they explored. People walking on the sidewalk, children stomping in puddles, or a baby reaching for a toy. Finally, we get into the symbolic representation by telling our own story with movement. Students can use movement and dance steps to answer the question, "How did you travel to school today?"

Scaffolding is also an ever present teaching strategy in dance at all levels. Teachers demonstrate steps, students try out what they see, and the teacher follows up with by repeating the steps again or adding on something new.

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I really liked Vygotsky's idea that people can learn anything if they have the right scaffolding and social framework. I think teachers too often refuse to teach concepts because they are deemed too advanced for the grade level which consequently makes related content more difficult than it needs to be. For instance, while I was in high school physics, the teachers blatantly refused to teach even basic derivatives to students because they were apparently too young to learn calculus. I fortunately had already studied calculus by that time and could use it to help with my physics work. When I explained derivatives to my friends, they seemed to pick it up without issue and explained how it made physics much easier. As an upcoming biology teacher, I intend to use this concept for teaching concepts like molecular biology and biochemistry. Typically, chemistry is taught after biology but having a rudimentary understanding of how molecules are structured and interact with each other makes these concepts much more understandable. I intend to give my students a basic framework of chemistry knowledge so they can use it to understand the desired biological subjects at the molecular level.

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Considering that social studies has a lot to do with geography and how countries interact, geography is a concept I want to focus on in my future history classrooms. Based on my short observations already, high schoolers' knowledge of somewhat basic geography could use some refreshers. When asked about the Ocean between America and Britain, students had trouble naming the Atlantic. I believe if students have a better understanding of geography, it might help them situate the countries and peoples we talk about in class, hopefully improving their learning. Looking at Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which is the level of learning where students "can learn or perform a task with teacher assistance" (Johnson, 2019, 64), expanding students' knowledge of geography can expand their zone of proximal development. For example, if I am teaching a class on modern Europe, by going over oceans and continents, then focusing specifically on European geography, students potentially could contextualize their lessons easier and grasp more info. For a subject like modern European history, global geography is important to know too because European nations were doing plenty of colonizing and exploiting other nations, which would definitely be discussed. An understanding of world geography would help them learn about these interactions and how they transpired over time. Hopefully, by expanding students' knowledge of geography, the Z.P.D. for students would become larger and they would be able to learn much more in class through guided and interactive instruction.

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Most of my teaching experience is with students in the Pre-operational and Concrete Operational stages.
Many of the dance classes I taught this past year were with students ages 2-5. We focused a lot on imagination and exploration (during butterfly stretch, we share what color our butterfly is and where it's flying, we do our "pizza" stretch instead of a straddle, we "fly like an airplane" on our bellies to help with core strength and stability, and we "make a rainstorm" to show understanding of the difference between quiet, soft noises and loud, forceful noises). Students at this age also ask a me a lot of questions not necessarily related to dance (like if I sleep at the studio or why I have so many earrings), and are uninhibited in sharing things about their families or home life. They know that coming to dance class is part of their routine, but don't fully understand the concept of time and can't distinguish when they come (often referring to a previous class as "yesterday" when it was really a week ago).
In a class I taught to students ages 7-10, the dancers were able to recognize ballet terminology (hearing or seeing the word) and then demonstrate the step or movement. They further demonstrated their concrete knowledge and reasoning skills by doing this in the opposite order (seeing a movement or step and then saying or writing the name of it).

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Of Piaget's four stages of development, the two I am most familiar with are the sensorimotor stage and the concrete operational stage. This is because I have younger relatives who I am able to observe as they express the characteristics associated with these particular stages.
The sensorimotor stage occurs between ages 0-2. This stage is defined by a child stimulating their 5 senses, engaging in physical movement, and the development of working memory, reflexes, and habit formation. This stage is best exemplified by my twin cousins who are just under 2 years old. I spend a lot of time with them and I have noticed that they are most drawn to activities where they can exercise their senses. Their mother, my aunt, is a psychologist, so she understands how important activities such as there are for the girls' developing brains. Therefore, she creates things like sensory bins that are filled with different objects, textures, tools, and colors for the girls to play with. Additionally, now that it's summer, she got the twins a water sensory table where they are able to be a little freer (and messy) in their exploration. It is clear that these activities are the ones the twins enjoy the most as they can remain preoccupied for hours.
As for the concrete operational stage, this phase usually occurs between ages 7-11. This stage of development is defined by characteristics such as higher-order thinking such as logic, inductive reasoning, and understanding of conservation. My youngest brother is currently 11 years old and his heightened cognition is clear by the way he vocalizes his ideas, and by the questions he asks. I've noticed that when we watch fictional movies, he'll poke fun at the logical flaws he observes. For example, when we watch superhero movies or action movies, he'll point out how certain movements aren't possible according to physics. He usually finds this to be pretty funny, but it demonstrates how he's thinking beyond what he's seeing and not simply accepting it as something realistic.

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I was able to witness a sensorimotor stage at the time when my niece was eight months old and she played with stacking rings. At first, she used her senses to grasp them, and she would even put them in her mouth. As the time went on, she started to understand that the rings can be stacked and that led her to build ring towers, which indicated the development of her sensorimotor skills and object manipulation.
When I tutored a nine year old, we worked on solving math problems which involved calculations. My student struggled to understand the concept of subtracting the cost of an item from the amount paid. However, she had no issue calculating the cost by adding the items. What we did was repeat examples and we played with money, and that’s when she began to understand this reverse concept. This showed me her progress into the concrete operational stage as she developed the ability to mentally manipulate numbers and perform logical operations.

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Two stages I was drawn to from Piaget’s theory were preoperational stage and formal operational stage. Preoperational stage is the stage my 6-year-old nephew is in as far as learning. He is in kindergarten and has a broad vocabulary according to Piaget it is around this age the vocabulary expands from 200 to around 2,000 words. I find it amazing at some of the things he says even if he does not understand the exact meaning, one day I said,”Omg so much dysfunction” and he goes, “Auntie her said she don’t like to be around us.” This is a prime example of what Piaget referenced when he said it is around that age that children are very egocentric. He does not understand what dysfunction means but, in his mind, it translated to me not liking something and it took for me to apologize because he was not convinced that, that is what was meant. My niece is at the formal operation stage where she thinks very abstractly and just as Piaget referenced analogies and how kids can use abstract thinking she is in her phase of making everything an analogy or challenging me to a math problem, she is also very attentive to facial expressions and body movement which is a direct example of her ability to infer something based off of what she is seeing.

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Jerome Bruner's Theory of Teaching Concepts

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Jerome Bruner's Theory of Teaching Concepts

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For this exercise, I focus on Jerome Bruner’s theories surrounding learning as applied to history, or social science, education for secondary students. For review, Bruner is most known for developing learning theories and pedagogical theories such as the spiral curriculum, discovery learning, or teaching concepts. Bruner’s approach emphasizes a concrete-to-abstract (also referred to as simple-to-complex) learning method that starts wholistically and gradually specifies as students move through their educational journey (Johnson, 2019, 92).

For the purposes of a high school history class, teaching concepts is of the utmost importance for this course, as history seeks to define key governmental, societal, cultural, geographical, and historical items that may prove difficult for secondary students to grasp, organize, and synthesize. To place Bruner’s teaching of concepts into a hypothetical example, suppose students are learning about the formation of the United States government during the Constitutional Convention. The essential question of this unit could focus on this: what are the defining characteristics and values of the United States government? During this political science discourse, students will be exposed to various theories of government, like republicanism, democracy, monarchy, and oligarchy, and the variety of justifications around why our government formed in the manner in which it did. The teacher assumes the responsibility of organizing, differentiating, and explaining key technical terms that build from student’s already preexisting notions that the United States government is multifaceted, complex, and an exemplary form of government given the historical context of its creation. Direct instruction is crucial in the successful implementation of teaching concepts. Therefore, the teacher can form lectures around competing visions of government and provide supplemental resources and activities like graphic organizers, independent writing prompts, or perhaps an oral debate performance, that encourages students to engage in guided practices that reinforce comprehension of key concepts.

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Give a hypothetical example from your grade level/content area of a key concept of your theorist.

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Give two examples of expository teaching.  What advantages and/or disadvantages do you see with these strategies?

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Give a hypothetical example from your grade level/content area of a key concept of your theorist.

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Choose 2 stages from Piaget's stages of development (sensorimotor, pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational) and give an example from real life for each of them. Your example can be something from your childhood or a child/student you know.