Module 10: Teaching Goals and Strategies

At this time in the workshop you may be wondering how you can begin to use the ideas of stages of reasoning and self-regulation immediately, without writing your own textbook or developing all new laboratory activities. Even though the teaching materials have a strong influence on your course, your own personal actions and approaches to the students can be very important as well. In this module we shall describe procedures that will enable you to make your teaching more effective in stimulating your students to use their existing reasoning patterns and to develop new ones by self-regulation. We shall also ask you to consider how you might balance course goals directed towards course content with other goals directed towards advancing your student\u27s reasoning patterns. At this point we re-emphasize that Piaget views intellectual development as an internal, personal construction. In other words, the formation of new reasoning patterns is really the product of the individual student\u27s mind - hence the term self-regulation