Learning Theories

There have been many learning theories created over the years and they are constantly developing. They are created to form understanding about the way we learn and to educate us on how to make the most of learning through our different abilities and functions.
Who are some of the most influential theorists? What do they preach?

Jean Piaget

Jean Piaget was originally a biologist who started off studying water snails, then moved on to the development of children's understanding. He explored this notion through observation, talking, and listening to children while they worked through activities Piaget had set. His ideas and theories have been extremely influential in education to this day. School curriculum all over the world have been structured around his findings.
Piaget's investigation and research into the process of children's maturation suggests that children aren't capable of performing particular tasks until their bodies are physically mature enough to do so. He also put forward that children's thinking doesn't develop in one smooth motion, seeing transitions at certain stages in our development. Piaget observed these points of advancement take place at 18 months, 7 years and 11 or 12 years.


Loris Malaguzzi

A poem written by Loris Malaguzzi, 1996
The child is made of one hundred
The child
is made of one hundred
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marvelling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred, hundred, hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The School and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas
They tell the child
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there
The child says
No way, The hundred is there.

Loris Malaguzzi is the motivation behind the educational program Reggio Emilia. He began as a primary school teacher and moved on to study psychology and in particular education. He was a strong character and highly collaborative. He worked hard in developing Reggio Emilia to advance his understanding of how children learn and to expose his idea of a capable and confident child. The primary thinking of Reggio Emilia is that the child has their own values. They are encouraged to develop their own theories about the world and how it works through exploration. The image of the child is seen as 'rich in potential, strong, powerful and competent.'

Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky's theories were influences by the political environment at the time, it was the Russian revolution and there was a great emphasis in co-operation and sharing. Individual accomplishment was seen as reflecting the success of a culture. He used these concepts to influence his theories of human development, which is the Sociocultural approach; that people developed as a product of their culture. Vygotsky saw that the functions in a child's cultural development appear twice, between people and then individually. Culture assists to the child's intellectual development, they gain a great deal of their knowledge from it, and also the tools of intellectual adaption from the culture surrounding them. His theory presented that learning occurs through sharing problem solving experiences with someone else. 'Level of development' is what Vygotsky refers to children acting on their own. He believes the level of actual development is what an IQ test measures. He also pointed out the difference between the ways students learn from others, two may have the same level of actual development, but when being helped by an adult one might be able to solve more problems then the other. What the child can do is known as the 'level of potential development.'