When deciding to become a teacher, a main priority for me was to make a difference in the world. Many of the other job options I had considered did not seem to have the kind immediate effect on the world that I desired. However, I know from personal experience and the relationships I had with my high school teachers the impact I can make with this career. The impact that I make will not merely be based on the subject that I teach. Instead, my main influence will be in the way I treat my students as people. I need to trust, as suggested by Carl Rogers, that they "who are in real contact with problems that are relevant to them wish to learn, want to grow, seek to discover, endeavor to master, desire to create, move toward self-discipline." By using the theories of educational psychology, I will be more prepared to create such an environment for my students. Educational psychology has given me two types of instruments for my toolbox: those that help me understand the ways in which adolescents are the same and those that help me understand that they are different. Each of them has their place in the classroom, and I will apply both on a daily basis.

In many ways, the stage theories of educational psychology indicate to me the many ways in which my students can be the same. D.F. Byrne made an important point when he investigated the relationship between Jean Piaget's cognitive, Lawrence Kohlberg's moral, and Robert Selman's social developmental theories. The tight correlation between the domains indicate to me the importance in helping my students mature as people, regardless of whether they want to become a scientist or not. I will simply use science as a springboard to help these students grow in these three domains. For example, if I am teaching earth science to freshmen, many of them will have well-developed concrete operations. In order to help them rise to the level of formal operations, I cannot force them to think abstractly because they will only return to their concrete thinking later. Instead, I must encourage students to construct their own knowledge that will naturally fit their understanding. Science lends itself to this constructivism because it is derived from people asking questions about the world and finding ways to answer them. By giving more freedom to the classroom for the students to generate their own experiments in a safe environment, more students will be able to develop cognitively. Once students begin to be able to think more abstractly in the classroom, they will also be able to think more abstractly in their social spheres. As freshman in high school, they are, according to Selman, moving toward a societal perspective. In order to help them gain an understanding that there is a relativity of perspectives held by themselves and social groups, role taking should become a part of daily life in the classroom. In a sense, by conducting experiments, the students have to take on the role of the scientist. So as they explore more abstract concepts cognitively, they are also learning how to consider more abstract social constructs. Scientific controversies also pose social conflicts. By forming discussion groups where people at different social stages discuss their viewpoints, they will develop their perspective taking skills and perhaps discover a new way of seeing the world. As the students develop their own way of considering the world on a cognitive and social level, they will soon be able to construct their own approach to dealing with moral problems. While before they might have just taken the rules of the school for granted, the students will now question whether the social conventions are truly just or valid. This might be hard for me to handle because I will want to have control over the classroom; however, it is important for the students to create their own democratic environment. In this way, they will be able to work through real moral conflicts that arise in the classroom. They will be able to use the abstract and perspective-taking skills learned in other domains and apply them to moral dilemmas faced in school life as well as science, such as human cloning and abortion.

The main limitation, however, to the above theories is that they assume that all students go through developmental stages in the same fashion. While there might be some similarity among my students, there will also be many variations. Social learning theory points out that the environment, behavior, and the personís internal characteristics all influence each other in a myriad of ways. Because from person to person these domains vary, each individual in my class will function differently. While this thought may be intimidating, social learning theory also indicates that I can have a great impact on my students by modeling and helping them imitate my skills that I would like to pass on to them (or even ones that I would not!). But because of the different environments these youths come from, I will also have to realize the difficulties these students may face outside of the classroom. By watching for a loss in the level of voice of a student, expression through aggressive behavior, or an ever-tired face, I can look for clues on how these students may need help. I hope that I am able to form support groups within the classroom that foster social skills, help students build a healthy self-concept through specific positive feedback, and offer activities outside of the classroom that will provide a creative outlet for the students who find no support at home. In these ways, I can prevent those students from becoming depressed, joining a gang, or going through other forms of storm and stress. In any case, I hope that students will view me as someone to whom they can come for empathy and that I will provide them with the resources that they need.

These aspirations might seem as idealistic as Carl Rogers, but I believe that this is the attitude I must have in order to fight the cynicism that is so prevalent in this world. After taking this class, I can feel more confident about this idealistic view because I now have many of the tools it takes to foster such an optimistic environment for the classroom. With this knowledge, I know I will make a positive difference in this world.
 
 

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