The Role of Maturation in Learning
Maturation involves physical body changes and is thus a form of development that involves learning. Physical changes trigger human behaviors due to experience that enables children to accept and understand development. The experience causes the learner to gain some long-term skills, thoughts, and comprehension, termed as knowledge. Therefore, maturation plays a big role in children’s development since they need a certain level of growth to learn practical skills. Maturation is progressive; therefore, a child gains the skills cumulatively through interaction with cognitive, corporal, social, and expressive aspects of life.
Life experiences are either favorable or harsh, and learners respond in accordance with the experience. The way a child responds to a given situation directly relates to his/her stage of development. In line with Broadhead et al. (2010), learning is an ability to develop a task at one stage to boost the chances of progressing through future stages successfully. If a child fails to learn a task at a certain stage, the chances of progress are diminished due to difficulties.
The Response to the Statement
“Teaching is about learning skills and acquiring content/knowledge. Paying attention to what you think is going on with them emotionally is a waste of time.”
The response would have a basis on facts that support the importance of teaching. First, the teacher must guide a teenager to understand and accept the rapid physical changes. What is the importance of team/group work in a class setting? It assists in developing social behaviors besides boosting the process of acquiring knowledge or skills. Therefore, the teacher indirectly pays attention to the learner’s emotional needs when he/she engages in teamwork.
There is a need to foster sense in students before acquiring knowledge or skills about a new task. It is impossible to ensure that what one teaches makes sense to learners unless one takes some time to consider their emotional way of thinking. Standardized instructions cannot assist the student until the teacher modifies them to fit the learners’ way of thinking. Therefore, the teacher must reflect on social and academic needs by paying attention to students’ reasoning.
Benefits and Downside of Single-Sex Classrooms
There is an evident debate of the evident gender gap when considering the humanities and the science subjects.
Benefits
- Enhanced confidence due to fair and more enhanced competition.
- Easy career identification and training for real-world situations.
- Specialization of studies and teaching styles.
- Fair and more enhanced competition.
Downsides
- Socialization. Low understanding of the opposite sex.
- Poor formation of relationships between sexes.
- Lack of socially related distractions for criticism and comparison of what is acceptable or not.
Personal Thoughts on a Single-Sex Schools Setting
I would wish to send my own child to a single-sex school because males and females have different ways or preferences of learning due to biological and social differences (Arthur and Cremin, 2010). The gap between social or scientific subjects is due to the teacher’s failure to adapt to the right teaching method. This becomes more difficult when a teacher is in a mixed school. Gender differences indicate that students will have different ways of perceiving, analyzing, storing, recalling, and responding to information.
The whole aspect of receiving the information depends on their neural system (sensory preferences) made of visual, aural, and kinesthetic (VAK) approaches (Arthur and Cremin, 2010). Thus, teachers in single-sex schools understand how best their students acquire knowledge, thus specialize in a certain teaching style.
Teaching in a Single-Sex Setting
Such teaching would be easy to deal with and specialize in one teaching style. In line with VAK, a student in the “V” category prefer observing physical representations in “A” prefer Listening as well as recording, while “K” has a preference for physical experiences. Although students can use a combination of this, there are those who use uni-modal style instead of bi, multi, or quad- modal. Females prefer uni-modal, while male desire multimodal. Therefore, specializing in either style is easier and promotes the ability to achieve.
References
Arthur, J. & Cremin, T. (2010). Learning to Teach in the Primary School. New York. NY: Routledge Publishers.
Broadhead, P., Howard, J., & Wood, E. (2010). Play and Learning in the Early Years: From Research to Practice. London, UK: SAGE Publication Ltd.