This morning as I was looking on the Internet I found a wonderful website filled with resources for a Social Studies teacher. The site is http://awesomelibrary.org/teacher. This site contains links to many different issues and subject areas within the social studies. These subject areas include such categories as history of the West, the Civil War, Current Events, and Religions. In each category is a list of and links to Internet resources for use by students searching the Internet or teachers looking for more information and classroom materials. There are links to lesson plans, information websites, current web articles/editorials, and news stories that relate to the subject. The best part is the links are for the most part functional and link to quality websites.

One thing that I have been thinking about this week is the way that the different developmental theorists are neither completely correct or completely wrong. There are varied circumstances that require different theories for explaining the learning and development. In the past, I have sometimes focused and leaned more toward one particular theory (usually Vygotsky) at the expense of situtations that required a more Piagetian outlook. The article that I read for Wednesday, "History, Narrative, and Human Temporal Perspective: In Search of a Developmental Paradigm," helped me to see that for some situations Piaget's theory fits better, while at other times Vygotsky's theory better reflects the learning situation.

Yesterday, I spent some time visiting with Professor Jorgensen. I am currently enrolled in her section of the Paideia Capstone class, Making Decisions in U.S. Schools. At this point in the class we are focusing on philosophy and especially philosophies of education. Our discussion centered around this topic. As I start looking down the road to a classroom that I might teach in the future, the decisions that I make will be expressions of a philosophy whether or not I am consciously aware of that philosophy. However, as Professor Jorgensen helped guide me to think that a philosophy does not exist on its own, but is situated instead as a guide. From the position of philosophy a teacher (administrator, policy maker, or citizen) then accesses different empirical or scientific knowledge that can help produce the goals that the philosophy of education deems worthy of attaining. It is in this acessing of empirical or scientific knowledge that Ed Psych, and the developmental theories of Piaget and Vygotsky come into play. While there is a distinct philosophy behind each of these theories, they have the ability to be separated from that context and used to achieve the educational goals of individuals, communities, and our nation at large.