Essay on Examining Educational Theorists and Current...

Examining Educational Theorists and Current Practice Today Abstract This paper names three educational theorists, Benjamin Bloom, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, and seeks to examine their most well-known theories. These are namely, Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Piaget’s Stages of Cognitive Development, and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Each theory is briefly explained and then compared and contrasted with the other theories. Lastly, the author reflects on the practical application of these theories in a classroom setting, discussing how these philosophies fit into the author’s current practice. Can anyone with a thought, idea, or theory about a topic be considered a theorist? Those who†¦show more content†¦The theorists whom this student-educator will focus on in this paper are Benjamin Bloom, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky. Perhaps best known for his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956), learning theorist Benjamin Bloom spent much of his life devoted to helping others see â€Å"education as an exercise in optimism† (Eisner, 2000) through the work he performed. In his work as a university examiner Bloom wanted to have more reliable procedures for assessing students and the outcomes of educational practices (Eisner, 2000). This need resulted in his Taxonomy of Educational Objectives Handbook 1 in the Cognitive Domain (1956) to be used in the preparation of evaluation materials. Bloom’s Taxonomy examines cognitive operations and orders them into six increasingly complex levels, with each level dependent on the student’s ability to perform at the levels that precede it (Eisner, 2000). These levels of cognition, from simple to most complex are as follows: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation (Bloom, 1956). Today Bloom’s Taxonomy is not just for university examiners; undergraduate and graduate students in education study this taxonomy so that as teachers they may better assist those they teach to reach the most complex levels of cognition in their studies and demonstrate true understanding. Jean Piaget, a researcher in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology, had one goalShow MoreRelatedA Brief History Of Multicultural Education2246 Words   |  9 Pagesmulticultural education is. And therein lies one of the problems of MCE. There is no single, all-encompassing, everyone-agrees definition. When reading articles and books on MCE and even the history and development of the field of what is known today as â€Å"multicultural education†, each author defines the concepts to his/her meaning for each publication. 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