Classrooms as Stages: A Developmental Alternative to Individualized, Acquisitional Learning

What Is a Stage?

By definition a stage can be a “step in a process of development” or a platform that has been built “upon which people perform” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stage). Not surprisingly, for most of the history of formal education, the first definition, understood as the individual’s progression through a series of developmental stages on their way to maturity, has dominated. However, as the understanding of development has transformed to be increasingly social, cultural, and activistic, the theatrical definition offers possibilities for helping to transform teaching and learning to meet the needs of twenty-first-century learners.

Stages of Development

Beginning with Sigmund Freud and G. Stanley Hall, stage theories established childhood as a qualitatively distinct period of human life and brought into existence the field of developmental psychology. Jean Piaget borrowing from Freud’s psychosexual stages, as well as the biological sciences and observations...