At the risk of being overly simplistic, I would humbly suggest that the word development encapsulates what I hold to be the essence of what attracted me to education as a career in the first place and what has nourished and informed my teaching to this day.
For the majority of my career I have tried to share with as many colleagues as possible my developmentally informed educational teaching style. Specifically I have tried to glean from the research and theory of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg insights into how best to stimulate, nourish and foster every student’s personal growth in a variety of ways. I have worked hard to develop student cognitive reasoning as they advance from Piaget’s concrete operational stage to formal operational thinking and their moral reasoning through Kohlberg's stages of moral development. I have learned and tried to share with others, the insight that without a sound grounding in these adolescent stages of development, the best lessons of history, literature, philosophy, government, economics and most complex disciplines can never be fully appreciated and confronted, much less mastered. How can a student understand the majesty of our democracy as eloquently penned by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that “governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed†without a solid intellectual base grounded in the Piaget and Kohlberg typologies.