Moral and Brain Development
In my experience with my students at the youth center, who are all between first and second grade, their brains are developing rapidly. The student I work with one on one speaks two languages. He only speaks Spanish at home and learned English in school. This is an example of the brain’s plasticity, or flexibility to adapt to new experiences. Learning languages is experience-expectant plasticity, the brain expects to receive language acquisition from the environment established through evolution. I wonder if there is a sensitive period to learning a second language?
My student is also learning to read and write, this is experience-dependent plasticity, because the connection is formed due to experiences. Reading is new in the view of evolution, so our brains are not prewired for it, and it has to modify connections that are already present for language in reaction to learning to read. The students in the youth center vary in their ability to read. There are differences based on the amount of exposure the student has had to books and printed materials. Some of our students have reading disabilities, which means that their brain does not show the typical progression from relying on the temporo-parietal area to activation in the visual word form area in the occipito-parietal region.
According to Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning children, most of the students in the program are in stage two, naïve hedonistic, or what is in it for me? I see this in the students when they ask if they can have a story after they finish their work. When they are told yes, they get excited and participate more fully. This is why reward systems work so well in most classrooms. I have also seen children get in trouble because on child bumps into another child and that child perceived it as something that was done intentionally to him, so he pushes the other child back. When the child gets scolded, he replies, “he pushed me first!” In other words, he was mean to me, so I am going to be mean back. It is said that children need to be subjected to people and situations that present new ideas beyond their own perceptions to develop. I wonder if there is a preferred way to help children in the classroom to progress past the preconventional level?
