13 Key Theories of Learning and Development
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Key Theories of Learning and Development
Unlearning Box
“He is just so lazy – sits there and refuses to do any work. And his parents are no help – they never return phone calls or emails. Why bother?”
This is an actual statement by a teacher frustrated with a fourth grader in her classroom. What this teacher did not know was the context in which the student was living. He was homeless and living out of his mother’s car. His mother couldn’t pay her cell phone bill, so had no way of receiving phone calls or emails. The teacher failed to realize what else could be contributing to his “laziness”: hunger, fear, lack of adequate care, and a parent unavailable to him with her own struggle to survive.
In order to teach our students, we have to know them. Multiple influences affect our students and their environments.
Chapter Outline
In this chapter, we will investigate how different systems influence learning and we will explore two theoretical perspectives on development.
Systems that Influence Student Learning
As humans grow and develop, there are many different systems that influence this development. Think about systems as interrelated parts of a whole, just like the solar system is made up of planets and other celestial objects. Two theories that consider various impacts on student learning are Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
One way to conceptualize influences on student learning is through need systems. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see Figure 2.2) theorized that people are motivated by a succession of hierarchical needs (McLeod, 2020). Originally, Maslow discussed five levels of needs shaped in the form of a pyramid. He later adjusted the pyramid to include eight levels of needs, incorporating need for knowledge and understanding, aesthetic needs, and transcendence. Figure 2.2 depicts these eight needs in hierarchical order. The first four levels are deficiency needs, and the upper four are growth needs. The first four are essential to a student’s well being, and they build on each other. These deficiency needs must be satisfied before a person can move on to the growth needs. Moving to the growth needs is essential for learning to truly occur. Now we will examine each of the elements within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in more depth.
Of the eight levels, the first is physiological needs. These needs include food, water, and shelter. In this case, do students have a home where they are properly nourished? If not, students who are not attending to their work may be hungry, not just daydreaming. This is why free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs are so essential in schools.
Safety and security needs are the second level of the pyramid. Students need to feel that they are not in harm’s way. Schools are responsible for maintaining safe environments for students and classrooms need to feel safe and secure. This requires classroom