Reading Summary 5- Vygotsky on Education Alicia Srinivasagam

CMCL 507

Robert Lake discusses Vygotsky’s idea of the Zone of Proximal Development and its importance
to understanding the role of the instructor or mentor in a student’s learning experience. The Zone
of Proximal Development (ZPD) refers to the learner’s potential understanding of a concept or
skill; this space continues to grow as the learner matures, and is also influenced by their life
experiences outside of school. In order to help students continue to grow this level of potential, a
learner centered classroom approach is essential. The instructor still needs to evaluate student
work and provide feedback, while being present as a facilitator of student inquiry rather than a
complete authority. This provides students with more freedom. Vygotsky’s ideas also emphasize
the idea of obuchenie; a term which signifies the cooperation and mutual dependence between
students and teachers. Students learn best when they are able to construct and discover
knowledge with teachers rather than under their authority.
The author highlights Vygotsky’s ideas of teaching, learning and the ZPD by comparing
them to contrasting views of learning and development. Earlier on, the general understanding of
learning ability was that it was determined by genetics; each person was assigned a fixed level of
intelligence. Behaviourism suggests that learning is simply habit formation developed through
repetition, but Vygotsky’s view focusses on social influences as an important factor in learning
and rejects the idea of thinking as a conditioned reflex that can only be developed under one’s
fixed level of intelligence. The ZPD promotes the idea of a growth mindset, where students can
keep improving and gaining higher levels of understanding as they work through challenges and
gain experience. Piaget’s idea of development before learning is also discussed; Piaget suggests
that learning cannot occur until students are developed enough, so classrooms should cater to the
student’s level of development. Vygotsky’s contrasting idea of learning preceding and
encouraging social and personal development is presented in this article using a sample dialogue
created by Chris Kerfoot. This dialogue highlights the growth vs fixed mindset idea presented in
the contrast between behaviourism and Vygotsky’s ideas, while also highlighting the way that
social learning helps development. Rather than presenting students with concepts at their “level”,
instructors should create classroom scenarios that promote experiential learning and stretch
students beyond their current level of understanding. This helps to expand student’s ZPD and
increases their adaptive expertise.
This idea of learning before development further highlights the intertwining interests of
teacher and student building learning experience together. Teachers can learn from student
process, and promote growth mindset and a learner-centered environment through classroom
activities. Collaborative work, modeling, and concrete examples can all be used to create a
supportive scaffold for learning. Students are able to observe the learning process through
modeling and examples and can then work together to achieve these same outcomes. The
instructor is present as a support and facilitator of classroom discussion, but students are able to
learn experientially and will soon be able to perform without any scaffolding support. This
process is then repeated, continually growing the ZPD and increasing the level of understating
students have. This method of teaching and learning takes the focus off of grades and benchmark
scores, and becomes more personalized to the growth and development of each learner.
The ideas presented in this reading can easily be applied to my position; mentoring is an
essential part of developing the ZPD of students. In the lab my responsibility is to facilitate
discussion and encourage students to work in teams and observe real specimens to learn more
about invertebrates. I can use modeling techniques and examples to explain how I would work
through challenges and complete exercises; this allows students to develop their own strategies
rather than being given the answer. As they develop these strategies, they will gain more
expertise in the lab and work without support of mentors and TAs. I have already noticed this
development in the students I work with, they work much more efficiently with very little
outside support now that they have completed 5 labs. However, the lab exercises themselves are
designed to expand each student’s ZPD; halfway through the semester additional self-discovery
and synthesis exercises are added to stretch students further. I plan to use scaffolding techniques
to help students to complete these higher-level exercises in a way that encourages them to keep
increasing their understanding of the subject and themselves as learners.

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