Respond to: Understanding the Young Adolescent’s Physical and Cognitive Growth
After reading this article, I realize that adolescence probably is the most challenging, critical and crucial stage of one’s whole life cycle. The fact strikes me the most is that being a successful adolescents’ educator guiding students to know and view their body and emotion changes positively is far from enough. Being an experienced and knowledgeable educator, most importantly we
also need to facilitate their cognition development transition from concrete operational thought to formal operational thought. Having been mentioned in the article that due to the limitation of intelligence and life experiences, some people have never reached the final stage of formal operational thought. Which reminds me the importance of learning experiences provided for these adolescents in school, as for some students, school could be the only place they can be challenged cognitively. Looking at this aspect, planning lessons strategically with the characteristics of concrete operational thought and formal operational thought embedded in mind, and always taking any opportunities could be seized in every lesson to bridge these two cognitive stages become prerequisite for an effective and meaningful learning experience.