Piaget

What evidence do you see of specific teacher behaviors that are geared toward Piaget's theories about cognitive development? Cite specific examples and make clear connection to Piaget's work. Be thorough in your coverage of the theory, addressing multiple concepts (e.g., stage(s) of development, process of adaptation/equilibration) to demonstrate your understanding. Be sure to include a reference in your response. 

The teacher I observe is really good about incorporating both concrete operational and formal operational techniques into her lessons. The two classes I've been observing are both 7th grade classes, so they're all either 12 or 13 years old, so they're probably in the Formal Operational stage, but there is a lot of gray area between the two stages, so some of the kids could still be in the Concrete Operational stage. This works out great with the way that the teacher teaches. She usually gives the new vocabulary words and has the students brainstorm about what they think they mean, and try and describe them. Then, she almost always has a learning activity that the students do before they discuss the more abstract concepts. In fact, she usually has multiple activities. These are great ways for the students to enhance learning in the Concrete Operational stage because it gives them a real-life learning experience, instead of just reading it in the textbook, or listening tot he teacher describe it. This article talks about "discovery learning" which is basically what is happening in the class I've been observing. Although, the type of activities I've observed seem to be more structured to not allow very much misunderstanding.  (http://www.learnnc.org/lp/pages/5352). And, I would say that when the students are using multiple senses like in the classroom activities, they are more likely to get the new information into a state of equilibrium since the multiple senses give them multiple facets to assimilate the content.
After these activities, she opens up the floor for more discussion using the new concepts the students have learned about. She lets them adapt or assimilate the new information by letting them give their ideas to the rest of the class. For example, last week the lesson was on traits and genes. She asked the students what the difference was between the two terms. My favorite response was something along the lines of "traits are like in Harry Potter where Harry is a really good seeker because his dad was a really good seeker, and Harry didn't even have to have Madam Pomfrey teach him how to fly, he just knew how. So, when Draco stole that Remember-globe from Neville, Harry just flew off and got it". The whole class totally agreed that this was a good definition of a trait. It was funny (not just because of the three Harry Potter trivia mistakes) because they had all been giving slightly different meanings to the two words, but everyone seemed to agree with everyone else's contrasting ideas and somehow assimilated them into their rough understanding of the word "trait".