Sunday, April 6, 2014

Lev Vygotsky


 
 
 
 
Vygotsky’s work represents a shift in constructivist thinking; he placed a heavy emphasis on the value of social collaborations, particularly with more expert partners. Vygotsky believed that the purpose of learning was to lead development. As Vygotsky noted, learning awakens a variety of internal developmental processes that are able to operate only when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with this peers. When applied to classroom environments, this translates into teachers engaging the children in discussions and activities a step ahead of their current developmental level.

Example: 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. 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. 
 

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