Small Moments/Point of View

Hagen had a plan to make this t.v.

Sammy and John were helping make a movie to watch on it. But there was one problem.

 

These were made so the actor could see the picture, and during the show, the audience could only see the back of the paper. Some of the audience complained. 

I love seeing these little glimpses of theory in action. Understanding another's viewpoint is linked to empathy and 'theory of mind', or understanding that other people have their own thoughts and preferences. Perspective taking is also an important part of developing spatial reasoning, which is the ability to use clues to understand things like relationships between objects, distance and direction. Knowing that a person sitting across the table is going to see a different side of an object placed in the middle requires that you can mentally understand the other person thinks differently than you do, and also that you can picture the object from all sides. Being able to shift in perspective from seeing only your own way to knowing that other people have a different point of view, is crucial work for young children.

Piaget and Inhelder wrote about the ability to understand that an observer standing in a different place would have a different view in their 'Three Mountains Task' back in 1956, and found that 9 or 10 year olds could consistently mentally represent that different observers would have different perspective. Since then experimenters have posited that very young children may be able to know that other people see a different view than they do, but may not be able to figure out or represent what exactly the other person could see.

One of the ways teachers at Sabot support growing the development of perspective taking is through observational drawing. When children spend time drawing an object and then seen that same object drawn by someone else at the table, that is perspective taking appearing right before their eyes.