Peer Learning

As I've mentioned in previous posts, my son is currently in Kindergarten at a public charter school here in Brooklyn.  This is an incredibly exciting time for all of us.  Watching our son grow and develop intellectually and socially is a very rewarding, if slightly bittersweet, part of all of our interactions.

In contrast to my time in elementary school, when Kindergarten was only a half-day, and consisted mainly of playtime and arts & crafts, my son's Kindergarten lasts all day and has a rigorous curriculum with various assignments and homework.

My son's birthday falls in October, and according the the NYC Dept of Educations rules, he is expected to start Kindergarten when he is only four years old.  My wife and I were a bit worried how our son might develop to the more rigorous curriculum he would be facing in Kindergarten.  Although he had done well in his pre-school and seemed to have the verbal and spatial skills to handle it, we were worried that he was still to immature to display the "Concrete Operational" skills that are required of today's Kindergarten students.

The "Concrete Operational Stage" is a stage in the framework of cognitive development created by Jean Piaget.  This stage is generally considered to begin around age 6, and is a stage where children begin to develop more logical thought process, especially in relation to problems of operations and conservation.

Our worries for our son seemed to be well founded at our first parent-teacher conference when it was revealed that he was performing mostly at an average to slightly below average level.  However, within the space of a month or two we found that his academic performance began to increase by leaps and bounds.

What could have been the source for this rapid improvement?  Not by coincidence, at this same time our son had formed a close friendship with one particular classmate.  This classmate was a very high performing student who had scored very highly on Gifted and Talented exams and was reading well above his grade level.  All of a sudden, it was as if potential skills that had been lying dormant for our son were finally awoken.

Our son's rapid improvement was mainly the process of "Peer Learning," or learning that occurs amongst a cohort.  In Piaget's theory, Peer Learning works by challenging a child to reconcile his mistaken thoughts and theories about the world.  When coming into contact with other children with advanced understanding that allows them to operate more effectively in the world, a child is forced to reconsider their previous misunderstandings and develop new, more accurate ones.  Piaget termed this process sociocognitive conflict.

As our son's academic skills have advanced, he has, for the most part, achieved parity with the highest performing students of his class and has developed a separate cohort with them.  Peer learning continues to be vital to his academic progress, but its nature has now changed.  Currently, his Peer Learning experience more closely resembles the theories developed by Lev Vygotsky.  In contrast with
Piaget, Vygotsky saw cognitive development as inseparable from one's social environment.  When it came to education, Vygotsky believed that "Peer Collaboration" was most important.  Rather than being a situation of teacher-student or mentor-mentee, where information is transmitted vertically, Peer Collaboration works best when children of roughly the same levels of power and knowledge work together to solve problems and explore concepts.

However, I think it would be a mistake to see the differences between Piaget's and Vygotsky's ideas of Peer Learning as oppositional, or even stages in a sequential process.  A child's full cognitive and intellectual development seems to be a fluid and dynamic equilibrium between the sort of individual striving to overcome misunderstandings and disequilibriums as Piaget describes, and social collaboration between peers to develop new and novel understandings, as described by Vygotsky.