Now that my experience in the 4 week sophomore block placement has concluded, I have learned a lot of different things that will help guide me in my future work as an educator, and one of these things is the idea of being developmentally appropriate, which to me means understanding where all of your students are at from a development standpoint and meeting them where they are at. I’ve also discovered that the term “development” is broad and can have a lot of different meanings. You can have development with the class material, you can have development with behavior and the ability to interact, you can have development with core values such as kindness and responsibility, so on and so forth. In short, the students are all over the place with their development across a wide variety of areas. Using this information, I learned that because students are at different stages of learning and development, you can’t do the same thing with all of the students and expect all of the results to be the same. For example, some students might not have as advanced knowledge with content when they’re posed with a task to work in their groups with, and for that reason they may need a little more help from the teacher, compared to other groups that may be able to move along just fine on their own. Or, perhaps the students have a solid knowledge of the content that they’re learning, but from a developmental standpoint, they aren’t at a stage yet where they can interact well with other people. This could mean they have a hard time staying on task, or they just stay quiet and don’t talk as much. What this would mean as a teacher is that when the students are working/conversing in their small groups, you have to get to know the kids well enough to a point where you know which ones are okay on their own and will do just fine and the groups that you have to check in with and keep an eye on a little more often. This connects back to the idea of being a developmentally appropriate educator because you’re being realistic with yourself as to where your students are at and using the proper amount of intervention strategies and applying these strategies in an appropriate manner. This is an example of being developmentally appropriate.
All in all, I think that this idea of being a developmentally appropriate educator connects back with meeting your students where they are at, doing everything you can to meet their needs to ultimately ensure they are set up for success in the classroom. I also believe that a crucial step to this process goes back to the idea that students, no matter what age, are changing and developing in many different ways, therefore you have to be patient with them and work with them to help them improve because this is a vital role that educators have. They play a significant part in the development of students, and connecting with them on a developmental level is a big part of that process.
