Vygotsky: The Social Connection
Vygotsky: The Social Connection
Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development is based on the idea that development is defined both by what a child can do independently and by what the child can do when assisted by an adult or more competent peer. According to Vygotsky, for the curriculum to be developmentally appropriate, the teacher must plan activities that encompass not only what children are capable of doing on their own but what they can learn with the help of others. For example, a child might be shown pennies to represent each sound in a word (e.g., three pennies for the three sounds in “man”). To master this word, the child might be asked to place a penny on the table to show each sound in a word, and finally the child might identify the sounds without the pennies. When the adult provides the child with pennies, the adult provides a scaffold to help the child move from assisted to unassisted success at the task (Spector, 1992). In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own.
A second important aspect of Vygotsky's theory is the role of play in his theory. According to this, teachers need to provide children, especially young children, many opportunities to play. Through play, and imagination a child's conceptual abilities are stretched. Vygotsky argued that play leads to development. "While imitating their elders in culturally-patterned activities, children generate opportunities for intellectual development. Initially, their games are recollections and reenactments of real situations; but through the dynamics of their imagination and recognition of implicit rules governing the activities they have reproduced in their games, children achieve an elementary mastery of abstract thought.
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Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development is based on the idea that development is defined both by what a child can do independently and by what the child can do when assisted by an adult or more competent peer. According to Vygotsky, for the curriculum to be developmentally appropriate, the teacher must plan activities that encompass not only what children are capable of doing on their own but what they can learn with the help of others. For example, a child might be shown pennies to represent each sound in a word (e.g., three pennies for the three sounds in “man”). To master this word, the child might be asked to place a penny on the table to show each sound in a word, and finally the child might identify the sounds without the pennies. When the adult provides the child with pennies, the adult provides a scaffold to help the child move from assisted to unassisted success at the task (Spector, 1992). In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own.
A second important aspect of Vygotsky's theory is the role of play in his theory. According to this, teachers need to provide children, especially young children, many opportunities to play. Through play, and imagination a child's conceptual abilities are stretched. Vygotsky argued that play leads to development. "While imitating their elders in culturally-patterned activities, children generate opportunities for intellectual development. Initially, their games are recollections and reenactments of real situations; but through the dynamics of their imagination and recognition of implicit rules governing the activities they have reproduced in their games, children achieve an elementary mastery of abstract thought.
Since language