Kelly, Stephen M. (2018). Teaching Music In American Society. New York, NY: Routledge.
In the first chapter of Teaching Music in American Society, Stephen M. Kelly gives an overview of several basic learning theories, including Jean Piaget's 4-Stage Theory, Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development, Jerome Bruner's Spiral Curriculum, Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, Erik Erikson's 8-Stage Psychosocial Development Theory, and Howard Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. They fall into either the behavioral or social learning theory, and consistently contain the following principles: that people develop at different rates, that development is relatively orderly, that development takes gradually, and some element of social/cultural experience is important to development.
Just like anything, no one of these learning theories seems to be the end-all, be-all. They each seem to be incredibly valuable and make sense to how humans develop, but I think teaching with a combination of these learning theories in mind would be most beneficial. In particular I am interested in learning more about Bloom's Taxonomy and Erikson's 8 stages of psychosocial develpment, as both have detailed stages and processes that could be incorporated into curricula and lesson plans. I also like the Zone of Proximal Development, which is a term I'm already familiar with bt it was valuable to see it further defined in the chapter. I would like to read the texts from Vygotsky, Bloom, and Erikson that these theories are based on. I also plan to read The Process of Education to better understand Bruner' Spiral Curriculum since it seems to be widely applied.
Questions for Dr. Kelly:
What are strategies for using discovery-based learning without asking open-ended questions that have correct answers (a notoriously bad teaching technique)?
In the context of a large class, how might the teacher teach in the ZPD - that is, how does the teacher find the most effective zone to teach in without frustrating struggling students or boring high-achieving ones?