Assessment 1 Vygotsky

For Vygotsky the connections that exist between people and the cultural context in which they live are important for learning to occur. He believed learning could be enhanced by a community of learning where children could learn from their peers as well as from adults. He described a zone of proximal development where students could move to acquire new skills and understanding if they were given the right help or scaffolding. Once students received the right assistance then they would be able to move through this zone and successfully complete new learning on their own.

I find that students enjoy learning from each other and that a student who has mastered a topic frequently can explain questions to a student working on a task in a helpful manner. Both students feel better having helped each other. The other student often motivates the learner to try new approaches and to generally be interested in the subject matter.
Scaffolding is important in all aspects of learning and takes many different forms. Telling a story about a subject I find to be a very effective form of scaffolding as it serves to arouse students interest in a topic and gives them ideas about how they might approach such a topic themselves. For example, telling a story about a personality of the Middle Ages gives the students a picture of life for that person and then raises questions in their mind about different aspects of their life. If they then go on to write an essay as if they were that person they can expand their own ideas and using their imagination go on to recreate life in that period of history. Their experience of that period would be augmented by their own research and they make it a living experience of history rather than a memorisation of facts. The scaffolding takes a variety of forms as the story brings the student into a zone where they really want to learn more about this person or generally learn more about life in this era. The students learn from each other by sharing their writing and by working in groups and stimulating new ideas.

Referenes:
http://www.coe.uga.edu/epitt/vygotskyconstructionism