Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development

I found this reassuring quote on Rachel's blog today:

"People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, even people with great minds and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls. — Lev Vygotsky

It reminded me of my days in teachers' college. Known for his sociocultural perspective, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a constructivist psychologist in Soviet Russia who believed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition.

In Mind in Society (1978, Harvard University Press), Vygotsky stated: "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals" (p. 57).

One example is pointing a finger. Initially, this behaviour begins as a meaningless grasping motion; however, as people react to the gesture, it becomes a movement that has meaning. In particular, the pointing gesture represents an interpersonal connection between individuals (p. 56). (With thanks to http://tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html.)

This speaks to the importance of learning in multi-age settings, in community, in the company of adults and elders.

His notion of the "zone of proximal development" informs (or should inform) every student teacher's education. It's certainly what family-based learning is all about. It is the difference between what a learner can do without help and what he or she can do with help. From Wikipedia:

Vygotsky stated that a child follows an adult's example and gradually develops the ability to do certain tasks without help or assistance. Vygotsky among other educational professionals believes the role of education to be to provide children with experiences which are in their ZPD, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning.

The concept of the zone of proximal development was originally developed by Vygotsky to argue against the use of standardized tests as a means to gauge students' intelligence. He argued that rather than examining what a student knows to determine intelligence, it is better to examine their ability to solve problems independently and their ability to solve problems with the assistance of an adult.

Gavin learning about wind energy with the help of
his mom, Renee.

Also from Wikipedia:

Zone of proximal development (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for the child to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of adults or more-skilled children. The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently. The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistance of an able instructor. The ZPD captures the child's cognitive skills that are in the process of maturing and can be accomplished only with the assistance of a more-skilled person.

Scaffolding is a concept closely related to the idea of ZPD. Scaffolding is changing the level of support. Over the course of a teaching session, a more-skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s current performance, tapering off this aid as it becomes unnecessary, much as a scaffold is removed from a building during construction.

Dialogue is an important tool of this process in the zone of proximal development. In a dialogue unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts of a child are met with the more systematic, logical and rational concepts of the skilled helper.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky or http://www.kolar.org/vygotsky/ for more on the work of this important educational psychologist.

I was talking with a Pender woman this morning who was the first — and last — teacher-librarian in the Langley school district. Teacher-librarians, victims of cuts to education funding, were wonderful additions to every school staff. Here's why (from Wikipedia):

ZPD when applied to reading is "the level of difficulty [of a book] that is neither too hard nor too easy, and is the level at which optimal learning takes place." [A reading software company] claims that students need to read books that are not too easy, so as to avoid boredom, and not too hard, so as to avoid frustration.

Now, that might seem like a giant DUH! But it's not always easy for parents or teachers to find just the right books to take full advantage of a child's zone of proximal development in reading. That's why I'm so nostalgic about teacher-librarians. They could walk to a shelf in the school library and pull out the perfect book for every child. They just knew! It was sheer delight for kids and such a help for fellow teachers — and parents.

Send in a comment if you've seen the zone of proximal development at work in your child/ren's learning.