Chapter 56

Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early

Childhood Curriculum

Elena Bodrova and Deborah J. Leong

Abstract  Tools of the Mind is an early childhood curriculum based on the princi-
ples of cultural-historical psychology. The program was originally developed and
pilot tested in Denver, Colorado, in the 1990s and since then has expanded to many
other states and is currently serving over 30,000 children ages 3–6. The main goal
of the program is to help children learn how to become – in Vygotsky’s words –
“masters of their own behavior.” To accomplish this, Tools of the Mind engages
young children in activities that promote their social, emotional, and cognitive self-­
regulation. Mature intentional make-believe play is one of the hallmarks of the pro-
gram, and special instructional strategies are employed to scaffold play in children
who enter preschool or kindergarten lacking mature play skills. In addition to sup-
porting play, Tools teachers engage children in a variety of other activities and
games that have children acquire early academic skills while at the same time prac-
ticing other-regulation and self-regulation.
Tools of the Mind gained attention in education community when a study pub-
lished in the journal Science by one of the leading neuroscientists in the USA
showed that Tools preschool children had higher levels of self-regulation than a
control group. Several new studies are currently underway, and their preliminary
results look promising. Tools represents innovative early childhood programs in the
UNESCO’s international database INODATA and is listed among seven effective
social-emotional learning programs in the 2013 Collaborative for Academic, Social
and Emotional Learning Guide.

Keywords Cultural-historical approach • Early childhood education • Make-

believe play • Scaffolding • Early literacy instruction

E. Bodrova (*)
Tools of the Mind, Denver, CO, USA
e-mail: ebodrova@toolsofthemind.org; elena.theasis@gmail.com
D.J. Leong
Tools of the Mind, Denver, CO, USA
Professor Emerita, Department of Psychology, Metropolitan State University of Denver,
Denver, CO, USA

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2018 1095

M. Fleer, B. van Oers (eds.), International Handbook of Early Childhood
Education, Springer International Handbooks of Education,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-024-0927-7_56
1096 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

Tools of the Mind (for short: Tools) is a comprehensive early childhood curriculum
based on the principles of cultural-historical psychology. It draws upon work of
several generations of post-Vygotskian scholars in the areas of education and psy-
chology as well as the recent developments in cognitive neuropsychology, particu-
larly in the area of self-regulation/executive functions. Tools uses both specific
activities that promote self-regulation and embeds self-regulation strategies into the
content of academic activities. At the core of the program are strategies designed to
promote the development of mature make-believe play. These strategies, along with
carefully planned activities designed to “amplify” social-emotional and cognitive
skills, enable Tools to support the internalization of mental tools helping children
become true “masters of their own behavior.” All Tools activities are designed to be
multilevel so that teachers can meet the needs of children of varying abilities within
the class.
Tools of the Mind was originally developed and pilot tested in Denver, Colorado,
in the 1990s and since then has expanded to many other states and is now being used
outside of the USA in Chile and Canada. To date, Tools has been implemented in a
variety of early childhood settings including public and private preschools, Head
Start, Even Start, as well as half-day and full-day kindergarten classrooms. Tools
has been aligned with early learning standards and kindergarten academic standards
in 20 states and 230 districts and programs as well as with the Common Core State
Standards. Tools training staff has been delivering professional development and
technical assistance to thousands of teachers, teacher assistants, administrators, and
support staff with their educational levels varying from high school to advanced
degrees. Tools professional development program also follows the Vygotskian
approach, scaffolding teacher learning through a system of coaching, workshops,
and self-reflection activities designed to provide teachers with an understanding of
learning processes and specific instructional tactics.

56.1  Tools of the Mind in the American Educational

Landscape

Although the definition of early childhood education used in the American educa-
tional community technically applies to children birth to age 8 (Copple and
Bredekamp 2009), in reality children of this age range are served by very different
educational systems. The very notion of early childhood curriculum typically is not
applied to the programs serving infants and toddlers. Children aged 3–5 that attend
center-based programs are more likely to be taught using curricula designed specifi-
cally for preschoolers. Some of these curricula are comprehensive, while others
focus on one or two content areas – mainly literacy or mathematics. Oftentimes,
teachers combine elements of several curricula and supplement these with activities
and materials they design on their own. State- and federally funded programs such
as Head Start are more likely to use curricula produced by major publishing houses,
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1097

while in private or municipal preschools, one can find a greater variety of curricula
and assessments.
Although not mandatory, kindergarten programs are considered part of the K-12
system of education, so they exist in primary schools. Five-year-old children learn
in settings similar to their 6- and 7-year-old peers, and their curricula has grown to
be more and more similar to the ones used in first and second grades. For example,
while 20 years ago by the end of their kindergarten year children were expected to
name the letters of the alphabet and recognize some high frequency words, today
they are expected to “read emergent-reader texts with purpose and understanding”
(Common Core State Standards Initiative 2012). This tendency to “push down”
content and pedagogy initially designed for older children to kindergartners and
now even preschoolers alarms developmental psychologists and early childhood
educators who attribute increase in learning difficulties and challenging behaviors
to the decline of make-believe play and other “uniquely preschool” activities (Miller
and Almon 2009).
Developing Vygotsky-based early childhood curricula in this social context
requires maintaining fine balance between ever-growing demands of state and
national academic standards and the goal to help young children develop cognitive
and social-emotional competencies that cultural-historical scholars consider devel-
opmental accomplishments unique to preschool and kindergarten age (Elkonin
1977; Karpov 2005). For Tools of the Mind, it meant that none of the activities or
materials could be simply adapted from activities designed by post-Vygotskian edu-
cators in Russia or in Europe but had to be built “from the ground up” in response
to the specific demands of the US early childhood classrooms.

56.2  Cultural-Historical Roots of Tools of the Mind

Tools is grounded in the Vygotskian cultural-historical theory of development and

learning. The curriculum also incorporates the contributions of post-Vygotskians
including Piotr Galperin, Daniel Elkonin, Alexander Zaporozhets, and Leonid
Venger. The contributions made by post-Vygotskians to the field of early childhood
education could be summarized in the idea of amplification of child development.
The term “amplification” was coined by Vygotsky’s colleague and the founder of
the All-Soviet Institute for Preschool Education, Alexander Zaporozhets, as the
answer to the push-down curricula ending up in turning preschool classroom into a
miniature copy of a primary classroom with teaching methods and materials mod-
eled after the ones used by elementary teachers:
Optimal educational opportunities for a young child to reach his or her potential and to
develop in a harmonious fashion are not created by accelerated ultra-early instruction aimed
at shortening the childhood period, that would prematurely turn a toddler into a preschooler
and a preschooler into a first-grader. What is needed is just the opposite – expansion and
enrichment of the content in the activities that are uniquely preschool: from play to painting
to interactions with peers and adults. (Zaporozhets 1986, p. 88)
1098 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

The idea of amplification was also intended to offer an alternative to the notion
of “spontaneous development” of young children, the idea that development could
not and should not be affected by instruction. Amplification focuses on the role of
education in child development, emphasizing that properly designed educational
interactions do not stifle development of young children but instead promote it,
thus, presenting a logical extension of Vygotsky’s principle of instruction leading
development.
Tools is one of the first attempts in the USA to create a comprehensive Vygotsky-­
based curriculum that could be used in early childhood classrooms. While Vygotsky-­
based curricula have been designed for older students (Campione and Brown 1990;
Newman et al. 1989; Tharp and Gallimore 1989), most of the previous attempts to
use Vygotsky-based pedagogy with younger children were limited to individual
instructional strategies such as the use of “Elkonin boxes” to teach phonemic
awareness (Clay 1993), isolated content areas such as the use of measurement to
introduce the concept of number (Sophian 2007), or focused on only one type of
scaffolding, primarily on adult-assisted learning in one-to-one setting (e.g.,
Hammond et al. 2012).
In contrast, Tools applies the cultural-historical approach consistently through-
out the entire program – from the design of specific activities and materials to the
organization of student’s daily experiences in a classroom to the use of dynamic
assessment in ongoing monitoring of student progress. The hallmark of Tools’
activities is the emphasis on children’s practicing self-regulation. Self-regulation
(volition in Vygotsky’s terms) is a mental facility necessary for the development of
higher mental functions (Vygotsky 1987) and one of critical prerequisites for school
success (Elkonin 1977, 1978). Tools’ activities used in preschool and kindergarten
are designed to “grow with the child,” constantly presenting children with new lev-
els of challenges. This makes activities and their variations too numerous to describe
in this chapter so we limited the description of Tools of the Mind classroom to just
two examples to illustrate how Vygotskian principles are embedded in daily experi-
ences of preschool and kindergarten children attending our program.

56.3  M
 ake-Believe Play Is the Leading Activity
of Preschool- and Kindergarten-Aged Children

For Vygotskians, certain activities children engage in produce the greatest gains in
development. Called “leading activities,” they are age specific and provide the best
conditions for the acquisition of cognitive and social competencies most critical for
child development at this age (Chaiklin et  al. 1999; Karpov 2005). The major
changes in the structure of these competencies marking the end of early childhood
are associated with their growing intentionality. This ability to engage in intentional
behaviors enables young children to make the necessary transition from learning
that “follows the child’s own agenda” to learning that “follows the school agenda”
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1099

(Vygotsky 1956, p. 426). In addition, when engaged in a leading activity appropri-

ate for their age, children develop prerequisites for the competencies that make it
possible for them to successfully transition to the leading activity specific to the
next age level (Elkonin 1977; Leont’ev 1978).
According to this theory, make-believe play is the leading activity of preschool-
and kindergarten-aged children, while the students of primary grades engage in the
activity of intentional learning (frequently referred to as the “learning activity”)
(Elkonin 1977; Leont’ev 1978). Vygotskians cite multiple benefits of young chil-
dren’s engagement in make-believe play focusing especially on play’s contributions
to children’s developing symbolic thinking and self-regulation. In their writings,
however, Vygotsky and his colleagues limited their definition of play to the dra-
matic or make-believe play of preschoolers and children of primary school age
(Vygotsky 1967; Elkonin 1978). Thus, the Vygotskian definition of play does not
include such activities as object manipulations and explorations that are considered
precursors to play in toddlers and younger preschoolers and such activities as games
and sports that are considered an outgrowth of play in children of school age.
Consistent with the foundational ideas of the cultural-historical theory, Vygotskians
do not believe that play develops spontaneously in all children once they reach pre-
school age but rather associate the level of play sophistication with certain features
of a child’s social situation of development, namely, the adult mediation of play.
There is indication in the writing of post-Vygotskian scholars that children need
to reach a certain level of play in order for it to start having its beneficial impact on
child development. Elaborating on Vygotsky’s insights on the nature of play, Daniel
Elkonin (1978, 2005b) introduced the idea of “mature” play, emphasizing that only
this kind of play can be a source of development in early childhood. Elkonin defined
mature (he used such terms as advanced or fully developed) play as a unique form
of children’s activity, the subject of which is the adult – his work and the system of
his relationships with others (Elkonin 2005a, p. 19), thus distinguishing this form of
play from other playful activities children engage in. Although Vygotsky himself
never used the terms “mature” or “advanced,” the play vignettes in his writings
seem to describe play that is fairly advanced. Based on the work of Vygotsky and
Elkonin as well as the work of their students, it is possible to identify several com-
ponents of mature play (Bodrova and Leong 2007):
First, mature play is characterized by the child’s use of objects-substitutes that
may bear very little if any resemblance to the objects they symbolize: they can use
a piece of yarn as a doctor’s stethoscope and colored playdough as pretend food – it
only matters that these substitutes can perform the same function as the object-­
prototype. As play continues to advance, these objects-substitutes become eventu-
ally unnecessary as most of the substitution takes place as the child uses gestures or
words to describe imaginary objects (Elkonin 1978). In contrast, children playing at
immature level can only use props if they are exact replicas of a real object (minia-
ture tools, utensils, dolls’ dresses, etc.). When such a child cannot find a realistic-­
looking prop, she cannot use a less realistic prop as a substitute so her play stops.
The second characteristic of mature play is the child’s ability to take on and
sustain a specific role by consistently engaging in pretend actions, speech, and
1100 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

i­ nteractions that fit this particular character. The more mature the play, the richer the
roles and the more complex the relationships between them. Another sign of mature
play is the child’s ability to follow the rules associated with the pretend scenario in
general (playing restaurant vs. playing school) and with a chosen character in par-
ticular (playing a chef vs. playing a teacher). It is the practice in following these
rules that is associated by the Vygotskians with children’s emerging ability to regu-
late their own behaviors and the behaviors of their play partners (Vygotsky 1967;
Elkonin 1978). Unlike children with well-developed play, immature players do not
assume a specific role or may only label the role they are playing (e.g. “I am
mommy”) without engaging in pretend actions or role speech, consistent with this
role. This child may even dress up in “mommy’s” clothes or put on high heels but
can be easily distracted by a new toy even if it is the “baby’s” toy. It shows that this
immature player is not yet able to conform to the rules associated with playing the
role of “mommy.”
Yet another characteristic of mature play is high quality of play scenarios that
often integrate many themes and span the time of several days or even weeks. While
growing in their length, play scenarios also grow in their complexity as they evolve
over time. Finally, as play becomes more mature, children progress from extended
acting out preceded by rudimentary planning to extended planning followed by
rudimentary acting out. Elkonin argues that “the more general and abbreviated the
actions in play, the more deeply they reflect the meaning, goal, and system of rela-
tionships in the adult activity that is being recreated” (2005b, p. 40). This extended
planning of future play is another indicator of children’s growing ability to engage
in deliberate, intentional behaviors. While play scenarios of mature players incorpo-
rate multiple scripts (e.g., taking care of a baby involves feeding the baby, bathing
the baby, putting the baby to bed, reading her a bedtime story, etc.), immature play-
ers are typically limited to acting out one or two scripts. When these children try to
act out more than one script, they may sequence these with no attention to whether
this sequence makes sense: a child may wash the “baby” with her clothes on and
then put “baby” to bed without taking her wet clothes off.
Evidence has been accumulating that play that exists in many of today’s early
childhood classrooms across the world does not always fit the definition of mature
play (Gudareva 2005; Levin 2008). Even 5- and 6-year-old children who according
to Vygotsky and Elkonin should be at the peak of their play performance often dis-
play signs of immature play that is more typical for toddlers and younger preschool-
ers: playing only with realistic props, enacting play scenarios that are stereotypical
and primitive, and displaying a repertoire of themes and roles that is rather limited
(Miller and Almon 2009; Smirnova and Gudareva 2004). Researchers associate this
apparent decline in play with changes in the culture of childhood such as the ten-
dency of children to spend more time in adult-led activities, the disappearance of
multi-age groups with older children serving as play mentors to the younger ones,
and the increase in time children spend playing on computers or watching TV. In
addition, teachers in early childhood classrooms often do not provide much needed
support for play which results in children not only not making progress but even
regressing to more primitive forms of play (Farran and Son-Yarbrough 2001).
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1101

Fig. 56.1 and 56.2  Play plans of one child at the beginning and the end of the year

56.3.1  Make-Believe Play in Tools of the Mind Preschool

As a leading activity for children of preschool and kindergarten age, make-believe

play holds a special place in the Tools curriculum with a special focus on adult’s
role in scaffolding children’s play to bring it to a more mature level. An important
part of this scaffolding process is helping children to plan their play. Elkonin (1978)
identified planning as one of the features of mature play, describing play of older
children as consisting mostly of lengthy discussions of who is going to do what and
how followed by brief periods of acting out. As with other components of play, role
and scenario planning can benefit from adult scaffolding. In Tools preschool class-
rooms, children engage in a planning session preceding their playtime. The teacher
starts by asking children what they want to play or what they want to be, encourag-
ing them to discuss the choice of the roles with their peers. Later in the year, the
teacher asks children about more specific details of their future play scenarios
including what props they might need or whether they need to assume a different
role (see Fig. 56.1 and 56.2 for play plans produced by the same preschool child at
the beginning and at the end of the year).
By making planning a necessary step in play, the Tools teachers direct children’s
attention to the specifics of their roles and to the existence of rules associated with
them. The planning process first takes place orally, but as children are encouraged
to represent their plans in drawing or pretend writing, this process produces even
greater benefits. First, as children engage in drawing, they are able to focus on their
future play for a longer period of time, thus thinking over more details of their pre-
tend scenarios. Second, having a tangible reminder helps children to regulate their
1102 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

own and their partners’ behaviors; if a child has a picture of a doctor with her name
on it, it becomes harder for another child to usurp this role. It also makes it easier to
the teacher to troubleshoot for possible conflicts and to engage children in brain-
storming the solutions: if two children want to be doctors, the teacher can introduce
different kinds of doctors such as an eye doctor and a surgeon. As children’s play
becomes more mature, teacher scaffolding during planning session fades away and
children initiate discussions of their future play on their own leading to longer play
episodes with more elaborate pretend scenarios.
Other forms of adult scaffolding of children’s play in preschool include introduc-
ing children to the use of multifunctional and unstructured play props, modeling
role speech associated with the characters children will be playing, and brainstorm-
ing various developments of a play scenario. Another important component in scaf-
folding preschooler’s play in Tools classrooms is making sure that children have
sufficient background knowledge associated with the theme of their play. To help
children build this background knowledge and acquire related vocabulary, Tools
teachers take children on field trips, invite speakers to tell children about their jobs,
and use pictures and videos to illustrate what happens in a restaurant or in a veteri-
narian’s office. To ensure that children can successfully use this new information in
their play, Tools teachers engage children in Make-Believe Play Practice prior to
children going to their play centers. During these practice sessions, teachers first
model how characters may act and talk and then children take turns playing differ-
ent characters and trying out new actions and phrases used in these roles. As with
any form of adult scaffolding, Make-Believe Play Practice sessions are used more
in the beginning of the year, and their use is decreased as children become more
independent in creating and acting out their own pretend scenarios.

56.3.2  Make-Believe Play in Tools of the Mind Kindergarten

While extended periods of make-believe play can still be observed in most pre-
school programs in the USA, the situation is different in kindergarten. In most kin-
dergartens, play is usually relegated to a 10–15 min free choice time at the beginning
or end of a school day or during recess. Many kindergarten classrooms no longer
have materials to support children’s engagement in make-believe play, and their
rooms do not have housekeeping or block areas (Miller and Almon 2009). While
some of these curricula may suggest using elements of play in literacy and math
activities, it is never done in a systematic fashion across different topics and activity
formats. What is described by teachers as “playful learning” in reality is often no
more than a teacher-led activity that was made more engaging for children due to
the presence of a familiar cartoon character.
In contrast, in Tools kindergarten classrooms, teachers continue to support the
kind of make-believe play that used to occur in kindergarten; they also help children
bring their play to a more mature level, as well as master new vocabulary and
develop text comprehension. To distinguish kindergarten play from play in p­ reschool,
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1103

it is called dramatization, because it is tied to stories and literature. While in Tools

preschool children play the experiences grounded in their lives and communities –
sick babies going to the doctor, families going to the restaurant, or friends coming
to a birthday party – in kindergarten, children play stories, events and interactions
that they might never have experienced themselves, but must use their imaginations
to dramatize what they imagine happened and might happen. Tools kindergartens
first use fairy tales as a fodder for dramatization scenarios and then quickly move
into chapter books, dramatizing the Magic Tree House stories, one chapter at a time,
as well as dramatizing the life and times of the book. For example, one Magic Tree
House book is about pirates, and children dramatize what they imagine life on a
pirate ship would be like as a backdrop to the adventures that befall the fictional
characters on their adventure. Chapter books were chosen because they challenge
children to remember a complicated ten-chapter story with very few illustrations, to
immerse themselves in imagining and creating the life and times of the book, and to
learn new vocabulary about living in the days of pirates. In these ways, children’s
dramatization of the Magic Tree House book strengthens children’s comprehension
skills as well as assists in developing intentionality and self-regulation.
Play planning, having started in Tools preschool, now continues in kindergarten
taking on a different form. Planning for play is now combined with language arts
and writing activities as children come up with their play scenario based on the
stories they hear during literacy time block. First, children draw and write a sum-
mary of what happened in the chapter the teacher read or about what they learned
from reading a nonfiction book or from watching a specifically designed PowerPoint
that described life as a pirate. The teacher scaffolds the writing by helping the chil-
dren act out what happened in the chapter he just read or by talking and acting out
how it would feel on a pirate ship, hoisting the sails, rowing the boat, and burying
the treasure. Children immerse themselves in pretend world of the book, so they
have not just the words but have tried to feel what it would be like. Then the children
write a summary of the current chapter or something they want to remember which
serves as a plan for the play (see Fig. 56.3 for an example of chapter summary).
Having completed their chapter summaries, children then go into centers where
they act out the story. Each center has a slightly different set of ‘props’ challenging
the children to work together to figure out how to use the available materials to
dramatize the story. Teachers have a critical role during the dramatization; they
circulate and observe children’s dramatization in each of the centers, assess the level
of play, and provide targeted scaffolding to support the development of play.
Teachers support children in various ways based on the level of play they observe,
from planning what might happen next in the story and helping the play scenario
evolve, to supporting children exchanging roles and replaying the story, to encour-
aging children to think explicitly about their plans in advance and discuss who will
do what and what will happen when.
Similar to make-believe play of preschoolers, dramatization in Tools kindergar-
ten facilitates children’s internalization of rules and expectations for how the pre-
tend scenario will happen and how each player will play and imposes constraints on
behavior. Children must remember the scenario they chose, the role they chose, and
1104 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

Fig. 56.3  Magic Tree House chapter summary

the roles other children chose. They must inhibit behaviors inconsistent with their
role (e.g., the pirates act differently from Jack and Annie, and the quartermaster
behaves differently than the captain or crew), and they cannot impulsively grab non-­
scenario-­related toys but must honor the plans they agreed on. Children’s writing of
the chapter summary becomes a plan for play. The children help regulate one
another as they monitor each other’s compliance with the rules and assigned roles
and dramatize the story. Thus, dramatization continues to help children increase
intentionality of their behaviors building toward the developmental accomplish-
ments of the early childhood age.

56.4  S
 caffolded Interactions Are Essential to Children’s
Learning

Although the term “scaffolding” has a long history in the West of being associated
with Vygotsky’s paradigm (Berk and Winsler 1995), it is not a term used either by
Vygotsky himself or by the post-Vygotskians. The closest term found in the writ-
ings of the post-Vygotskians is “razvivajuschee obuchenije” (development-oriented
instruction) (Davydov 1990), which provides an important link between Vygotsky’s
theory of learning and development and its classroom applications. We are using the
term “scaffolding” to describe the pedagogy unique to the Tools classroom, but we
use it in a way that makes this term more consistent with the Vygotskian view on the
relationship between instruction and development.
Scaffolding interactions are used in the course of teaching to help a child move
from being assisted by an adult in performing a new task to being able to perform
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1105

this and similar tasks independently (Bodrova and Leong 2007). These interactions
must fall within each individual’s Zone of Proximal Development so that they would
support the very skills and knowledge that are on the edge of emergence (Vygotsky
1978). When providing scaffolding, an adult does not make the task easier but
instead makes the child’s job easier by giving this child maximum support in the
beginning stages and then gradually withdrawing this support as the child’s mastery
of a new skill increases (Wood et al. 1976). An appropriate support is the one that
not only makes it easier for a child to complete a current task or brings to the surface
behaviors most mature to date but also plays a role in the child’s “construction of
mind,” influencing the development of mental categories and processes responsible
for the child’s performance on a variety of tasks. Thus, effective scaffolding pro-
vides only temporary support, needed until these new mental processes and catego-
ries are fully developed and can be used by the child without any outside assistance.
From this perspective, scaffolding may exist in different formats ranging from
teacher-child interactions when they work on a task jointly, to teacher introducing
the child to a strategy or a “tool” the child will be later able to use on his/her own,
to the teacher planning for a specific context or environment where the child will be
supported by other children (Bodrova and Leong 2007; Campione and Brown 1990;
Wood et al. 1976).
When applied to young children, scaffolding consistent with the Vygotskian
approach focuses on introducing children to the earliest strategies and “tools” even
young children can use on their own. Among these tools are private speech, external
mediators, and symbolic representations written or drawn by a child. According to
Vygotsky, private speech in young children is a precursor to verbal thinking that
serves as a carrier of thought at the time when children’s higher mental functions are
not fully developed (Vygotsky 1987). As it was later found by Alexander Luria,
(Luria 1969) and then confirmed by many studies within and outside Vygotskian
framework, private speech has another important function: it helps children regulate
their behaviors, both overt and mental (Berk 1992; Winsler et al. 2003). External
mediators are another example of the first tools that are used by children. They
include tangible objects, pictures of the objects, and physical actions that children
use to gain control over their own behavior. Alphabet chart used in many early
childhood classrooms is an example of an external mediator that reminds children
of the associations between a letter symbol and a corresponding letter sound. As a
scaffold, it is used only temporarily until children memorize the letter-sound
associations and no longer need an external reminder. Finally, children’s early
representations – symbolic drawings (pictographs), scribbles, or writing – were also
found by the Vygotskians to act as the first tools that children use to support their
memory (Luria 1983).
Yet another form of scaffolding, effectively used by post-Vygotskians but rarely
mentioned in the Western accounts of Vygotskian-based pedagogy, is the use of
specific social contexts facilitating children’s acquisition of mental tools and the
formation of higher mental functions. These social contexts vary from children
1106 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

assisting each other with the transition from other regulation to self-regulation as
they act out complex play scenarios (Vygotsky 1967; Elkonin 1978) to children
developing self-reflection and monitoring strategies as they check each other’s per-
formance on academic tasks (Rubtsov 1991).
Tools expands children’s repertoire of mental tools and provides new opportuni-
ties for children to use their existing tools. In Tools classrooms, teachers provide
scaffolding that meets the developmental and instructional needs of young children
in a variety of formats and across various contexts. For example, as children are
mastering the concept of number, the teacher may use several scaffolding strategies
(separately or combined in a single activity) to ensure that these children continue
to function at the upper levels of their zone of proximal development. For example,
the teacher may encourage children to use their private speech as they count, or
children may be introduced to a variety of “tools” – from simple external mediators
such as counters and manipulatives to more sophisticated ones such as a number
line. Finally, children engaged in counting activities may be assigned complimen-
tary roles of “doer” and “checker” assisted by corresponding picture cards with a
hand and a checkmark. In this case children scaffold each other by taking turns
checking each other’s work thus developing the ability to self-monitor that would be
critical later for their successful transition to learning activity.
Scaffolded Writing is an example of an instructional strategy unique to Tools that
uses multiple forms of scaffolding to help children master a complex skill of writing
(Bodrova and Leong 1995, 1998, 2001). In Scaffolded Writing, children use a line
to represent each word in a message that the child plans in advance. The child says
the message aloud and draws a line to represent each word. The lines act as a “tool”
(or a “symbol-substitute” in Vygotsky’s terms) for “word” in the same way that a
unit block stands for the concept of number and the lines are drawn in a way that
mimics the motor action of actual writing (left to right progression, continuing the
text by sweeping back to the left and ending with a punctuation mark). Once the
lines are drawn, the child goes back through the message and writes letters on each
line to represent the sounds. The level of representation of the sounds in a word fol-
lows a developmental progression from the representation of initial sounds to end-
ing, medial, and then eventually following the alphabetic principle (sounds in the
order that they appear in the word).
In addition to the lines serving as a temporary scaffold for the child’s emerging
concept of word, other formats of scaffolding are introduced to further support chil-
dren’s memory and attention that are extensively taxed during writing tasks. One of
these additional strategies used for scaffolding is engaging children in task-relevant
private speech. The other one is the use of children’s drawings that help them
remember the overall meaning of their message as they are focusing on writing
down letters and isolated words. Scaffolded Writing is first introduced in Tools pre-
school in the context of play planning (see Fig. 56.1 and 56.2) and is later used in
Tools kindergarten in all of the writing activities (see Fig. 56.3).
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1107

56.5  Research: Results and Challenges

From the very beginning, Tools positioned itself as an evidence-based curriculum,

its authors constantly researching, piloting, and refining all of its materials and
activities. The early studies employed primarily microgenetic design focusing in
depth on the changes in a single process such as writing as it had been systemati-
cally scaffolded (Bodrova and Leong 1995, 1998). In the first study that compared
preschool and kindergarten classrooms that implemented first Tools strategies with
non-Tools classrooms, the differences between children were significant in several
areas of development which resulted in Tools being nominated as the first innova-
tive early childhood programs to be included in the UNESCO’s international data-
base INODATA (Bodrova and Leong 2001).
The first formal evaluation of the effectiveness of Tools was conducted by the
National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) in a study where teachers
and their students were randomly assigned to either treatment or control classrooms
(Barnett et al. 2008). All of the classrooms were state-funded preschool classrooms
with the control group implementing an established, district-created model described
as a “balanced literacy curriculum with themes”(p. 299). The study was conducted
in a school district with a high level of poverty and a predominantly non-English
speaking population. Children (88 Tools and 122 controls ages 3 and 4) were com-
pared on social behavior, language, and literacy growth. The Tools curriculum was
found to improve classroom quality and children’s self-regulation, as indicated by
lower scores on the problem behavior dimension of the Social Skills Rating Scale
(Gresham and Elliot 1990). In addition, there were gains in language development;
however, these effects were smaller and did not reach conventional levels of statisti-
cal significance. Teachers trained in Tools scored higher in classroom management,
use of classroom time, and appropriate engagement interactions that challenged
children to learn at the next level.
Tools’ impact on children’s self-regulation/executive functions was the focus of
a separate study that used a subsample of children participating in the Barnett et al.
(2008) study reported above. In this study (Diamond et al. 2007), children with 1
year of Tools and 2 years of Tools were compared with children with similar demo-
graphic characteristics who had no Tools experience. All children were adminis-
tered tests designed to measure their executive functions (EF) – the neuropsychological
correlate of self-regulation. At the time of the study, all children attended kindergar-
ten and were an average of 5 years of age. To test EF, children were assessed on the
Dots and Flanker tests, which have been used with individuals from age 4 to adult
(Rueda et al. 2004). The results showed that on the test trials requiring minimal EF,
children in the Tools and control conditions performed the same. In those conditions
that taxed EF, children in Tools did significantly better than controls. Further analy-
ses comparing the child’s scores on the two EF tests and the academic achievement
measures collected on the Tools children found that the higher the level of EF,
1108 E. Bodrova and D.J. Leong

the higher the achievement scores. In addition, the results regarding the EF measures
correlated with the teachers’ ratings of behavior on the Social Skills Rating Scale.
Another interesting outcome of this study that was not formally measured but was
however reported by data collectors is that Tools graduates demonstrated higher
task persistence: children kept asking the testers to let them try one more time after
the test was over, and they felt they had made errors. In contrast, children from the
control group became easily discouraged after they made a couple of errors and did
not want to keep trying.
In the years following this study, there were several RCT studies where the
entire Tools curriculum or its elements were compared with other high-quality early
childhood curricula (e.g., Farran 2012). In all of these studies, children in the Tools
classrooms showed the same yearly progress on academic measures as children in
the control classrooms. In addition, children in the treatment and control conditions
did not differ on the measures of self-regulation, although self-regulation measures
used in these studies were classroom measures rather than the neuroscience mea-
sures used in Diamond’s study of 2007.
These results appear puzzling both in the light of earlier studies and in the con-
text of positive feedback from numerous school districts and programs that have
been implementing Tools for many years. These districts and programs report not
only immediate impact of Tools as reflected in student achievement gains at the end
of preschool or kindergarten but also long-lasting effects of the program as reflected
in test scores on standardized tests in third and fourth grades.
The newest efficacy study has just been completed, and this time researchers
compared academic achievement as well as the performance on EF tasks of kinder-
garten students that were or were not enrolled in Tools (Blair and Raver 2014). This
time, the results were consistent with earlier findings in Diamond et al. (2007) and
Barnett et al. (2008) studies: in addition to showing better results on a battery of EF
tasks, children enrolled in Tools outperformed their peers on literacy and math tests
with strongest effects in high-poverty schools. Most compelling is the data showing
that Tools graduates carried these gains into first grade, with even higher results in
reading and vocabulary. These stronger outcomes may reflect the fact that the devel-
opment of executive functions actually improves how children learn, making learn-
ing more effective, even beyond kindergarten.
Tools teachers share their students’ successes at professional conferences and
demonstrate their transformed classrooms to dozens of visitors including research-
ers, policymakers, and reporters. Tools is listed as one of the accepted early child-
hood curricula in many states and is chosen among seven effective social-emotional
learning programs in the 2013 Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional
Learning Guide (Domitrovich et al. 2013). With no advertisement, the number of
Tools sites continues to grow each year with many more sites waiting to implement
Tools in their classrooms. To date more than 450,000 children have been in Tools
programs.
56  Tools of the Mind: A Vygotskian Early Childhood Curriculum 1109

56.6  Tools of the Mind: Future Developments

The results of recent evaluation studies provided valuable feedback to the Tools
developers, which led to the revision of some procedures and materials used in pro-
fessional development. One of the important changes is increased focus on the fidel-
ity of Tools implementation and the development of formative assessments (Bodrova
et al. 2013) that will allow Tools trainers to provide timely support to teachers strug-
gling with the implementation. Since providing on-site support to teachers proved
to be very time-consuming and oftentimes teachers were not able to receive needed
feedback when they needed it most, Tools has developed a computer application to
become classroom teachers’ “mobile trainer.” The application (for now developed
for the iPads) is now being piloted with a group of Tools teachers. Further develop-
ment of this application with its future version available for other platforms is now
one of the top priorities in the Tools development efforts.
Another priority is the development of Tools materials designed specifically for
the teachers working with special populations such as children who are dual lan-
guage learners and children with special needs. The numbers of children in both of
these categories are growing and so is the need for increased individualization of
classroom instruction. Providing teachers with the knowledge of children’s devel-
opmental trajectories followed by further refining of scaffolding strategies to fit the
needs of children at different places on these trajectories will make this individual-
ization not only feasible but also more effective.
Finally, with more and more children attending state-funded preschools and kin-
dergartens, Tools needs to make sure that its activities meet the need of all children
and not just those who are at risk of falling behind in their academic and social-­
emotional development. This includes providing the enrichment activities that helps
children who are gifted and talented to also continue to grow and learn to their high-
est capacities.

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