What I Ve Learned From My 4 Year Old Viet Thanh Nguyen Analysis

As a future teacher, it will be part of my job to increase my students’ moral reasoning. Moral reasoning deals with how individuals think about moral issues. Lawrence Kohlberg developed stages of moral reasoning which researchers use to assess an individual. According to Steinberg (2014), the adults in an adolescent’s life can impact their moral development. Therefore, as their teacher, I will conduct activities in my classroom, such as Collaborative Reasoning, Think-Pair-Share, a line activity, and an online discussion board, which will foster my students’ moral development. In addition, I will monitor my students’ growth by conducting a pre-assessment as well as a final assessment. Through my classroom activities, I expect my students to

Children are not as oblivious as adults may believe they are. Even though they may have a lack of knowledge, and are not as smart as adults they can certainly listen and observe. In To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the town of Maycomb has hypocrites walking around town everyday. Scout and Jem are among the mixture of them not only at school, but also at home. People they are taught to respect and love are putting the wrong thoughts and ideas in their small developing brains. Hypocrites walk around acting like they are such good people, when in reality they really are nowhere near it.

What is also worth noticing is that spiritual maturity is greatly fostered through educating children. It is undeniable that the prerequisite for adults to encourage children moral awareness development is being the paragon of virtue. As a result, they always self-consciously conduct themself in parental position, which means the childish spontaneity in their speech and action yields to mature deliberation. In addition, having a kid, people profoundly penetrate the moral lessons in the university. These lessons, which took them a long time to learn by rote, now become a useful tool for them to teach etiquette to their child. In this case, parents put themselves at the place of teacher to thoroughly understand moral philosophy and deliver it in the simplest word which is suitable for an innocent thought. Consequently, practice ethical thought everyday will lead parents to higher level of maturity.

The manner we talk to our children becomes their inner voice, and will teach then what is right from wrong, and we should protect our children”

In today's world, most of the children are not aware of morally teachings. They are lack of them.

The more mistakes that one makes, the more they learn. One may repeat the same errors, but each time they do, they learn something new that they can carry with them throughout their entire lives. The lessons we learn from our faults reflect on who we become in the future. When we learn empathy we learn to consider the thoughts and feelings of other people when making consequential decisions. The children’s early mistakes in judgement teach them valuable lessons, which help them to make mature decisions later on.

Recently, those within education have begun to focus on not only teaching content, but also helping children to develop socially, emotionally and morally. Many teachers use activities in the classroom can help to improve students ability to develop their social identity, their emotional recognition, and their moral values. Furthermore, these types of activities can be useful for teachers in helping to establish an open, safe classroom environment where students can expand on their values and beliefs in a comfortable way. One activity that has commonly been used to improve these abilities is morality based questioning.

Vygotsky discussed how children learn socially, in a group with others, by using signs and cultural tools (Smidt, 2009). Once children begin to understand the world around them they begin to learn and develop. We can help this, as practitioners, by being their “more knowledgeable others” (Vygotsky, 1978) and furthering their understanding of the world in which they live. In my setting I find we can do this well by listening and responding to their conversations, moving their beliefs along and filling in gaps (Johnston and Nahmad-Williams). Once they have learnt something on a social level, the next step is to complete it individually. Once this has occurred the child has successful learnt something (Vygotsky, 1978) which we can view through planned observations. This is called the Zone of Proximal Development (Vygotsky and Cole 1978) more sensitive interactions can help children further into the next step of their development and understanding. In my setting I see this displayed a lot, by sitting with the children, firstly observing what they are doing and seeing how I can help them get a better understanding of the task. For

Parents are the first role models for children, children observe what we as parents do or say, being careful

Children do not live in ignorance to the social and moral matters in the world. They perceive the issues that plague the world and need answers. Some parents worry their children will lose their innocence once educated on moral guidelines. Yet, the multiple channels of moral worldviews a child receives draw a blurry line for a child to follow. Robert Coles expounds upon these topics in his article, “I Listen to My Parents and I Wonder What They Believe.” Parent’s failure to provide their child with a moral worldview detrimentally affects the way children develop their own thoughts.

I believe that when people are developing morals you have to have enough emotional development to feel guilty when you do something wrong, enough social development to accept our responsibility for behaving good or bad towards our group, and enough cognitive development to be able to place ourselves in someone else’s shoes. My parent taught me early in life the differences between right and wrong and to treat people the way I would want to be treated. I understood these lessons at a young age because that was the way my parent taught my brother and sister.

What whole child means to me is to educate our students better and give them a brighter future. I believed that children should be taught moral behaviors because, now a day’s children have become more disrespectful towards their teachers. The children do not want to learn any more. May be schools focus to much on having perfect scores in math and reading. No test score defines a child. Math and reading should be subjects to help students but what about the real-life skills. Now, I am not saying reading and math should not be taught in school. What I am really saying is to focus on helping the students to learn real life skills that will help them in the real world. If we teach our children life skills, they will be prepared for the real world.

Entering Tran Phu high school, I remember there was a huge white banner with bold letters, “For the sake of ten years, we must plant trees; for the sake of a hundred years, we should cultivate people.” In fact, the process of “cultivating people” requires lots of effort as much as planting a tree. To ensure a tree develops successfully, not only do people plant it into the ground, but they must also take care of it regularly. Undoubtedly, playing an integral role in contributing to people’s success, education shares the same task as planting a tree. Fortunately, having a chance to be exposed to Vietnamese and American educational systems, I have realized each one has its own value of educating people. Although both attempt to cultivate people, they have striking differences.

It is instinctive of young children not to part from their valuables. Trying to imbibe in them the qualities of empathy and generosity is a cumbersome task when you don’t want your child to succumb to short temper instead. However, with careful insights as follows, you can help them adapt a charitable character.

One positive and healthy way parents, educators, and role models can adapt moral reasoning into children is to teach children more than just asking for what they want and teaching them to use their social conventions at early stages of life. For example, if 6-year-old Lucy is playing with her toys, then suddenly realizes she is hungry, her first instinct is to get food. However, her father tells her she is not allowed to get food on her own because she is not old enough. She then demands him to make her food, but he tells her she must use her manners by asking politely and saying please. The next day, Lucy is playing with her toys again and realizes she is hungry. She has a choice to make. She must judge if attempting to get food on her own is right or wrong. Then she remembers it is because she is not old enough. Then she makes another judgment to ask her father to make her food, followed by a sweet and subtle “please”, so as not to disobey her father. Here is where her father should ask her why she chose the right actions instead of the actions