Great influencer Jerome Bruner 

Jerome Bruner

The legacy of Jerome Bruner who was an eminent Psychologist, professor and researcher whose work greatly influenced theories on early year’s education and the four modes of thinking and how they affect performance is evident. He is held in high regard in the field of early years education and his research which is used in delivering the curriculum is still highly relevant and used today.

Children are natural born thinkers and question everything any parent will confirm. Bruner stated it is imperative not to delay teaching any subject to this age group thinking it too hard for a child of their age. As, if any subject is broken down into small bite size chunks and repeated success will prevail. Bruner researched perception, memory, learning and cognition. Finding action based activities will store in a child’s memory better and if repeated will embed the lesson. A spiral curriculum is also highly successful, where the curriculum is broken into small chunks of information and activities which are revisited regularly to build the scaffolding on the subject. Thus offering mastery of a subject taught year after year growing in difficulty helping the child to be ready for each stage in their education.

Scaffolding learning is more effective with early exposure to a subject building scaffolding to become more competent with rich learning experiences rehearsing key skills. Burners Language Acquisition Support System shows that parents and caregivers who have a good interaction with the child will result in a child that is better in a social situation in early years. By pointing and asking questions you are interacting and encouraging the child to respond. It has been proven if this interaction is not present in the relationship the child will have their linguistic skills stunted and will never fully develop particularly between the ages of two and five. A step by step narrative in learning such as stories offering a broad range of tales that a child can relate to also gives children the best start. Jerome Bruner died on June the 5th 2016.