Children have a natural tendency to organize their experiences.  Piaget proposed that children use schemes to organize “groups of similar actions or thoughts that are used repeatedly in response to the environment.”  This tendency is instrumental in learning.  Teachers can use this ability to organize the learning process.  By introducing concepts to students that are related, the teacher allows the students’ natural abilities to categorize the information, and make it more understandable.  When the concepts are revisited, this knowledge becomes cemented.  Further, the students can use this ability to acquire new information based on examining the characteristics of a concept and organizing it into their existing catalog of experiences.

Development builds on prior acquisitions.  I believe that this is an essential concept to any form of teaching.  A student must understand the basic concepts of something before being able to apply it to a specific instance.  For example, a student learns how to identify character traits from written text in a novel.  From there, the understanding can deepen by looking for traits in a character from a different type of reading.  From there, the student can use the character traits to determine why the character feels or acts the way he or she does.  Also, the initial understanding of character traits can aid the student in foreshadowing how the character may react in certain situations, which enhances their ability to predict.

Observations of the physical environment – and ideally, frequent interactions with it -- promote development.  Piaget is in line with Gardner on this belief.  People learn in different ways, so visual learning is definitely pertinent.  However, I think that Piaget uses the physical environment to support or compliment learning.  For example, when reading a play in school (sure, why not Shakespeare?!), often the stage directions do not give an accurate picture of the action compared to seeing the play.  The physical environment expands the understanding of the philosophy behind the literature.  Also, more importantly, the personal inflections offered by the actors shed invaluable insight into the thought process of the characters, which also deepens understanding.