Vygotsky Theory

As a future professional educator, there are four specific ways in which I can incorporate Vygotsky’s theory of the Zone of Proximal development. For example, if some kindergarten students were struggling with a math lesson, that covered the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) standard K.CC-1, “counting to 100 by ones and tens,” I would encourage them to use counting blocks to help them solve the problem (Standards, 2015). Instead of providing these students with the answer, I would want them to try to find different ways to answer the question. This piece of advice that I would give to my students is stretching their zone of proximal development because they were purposefully given a math worksheet that was too hard for them to complete

The very first way that teachers can use these theories to teach constructively is by providing scaffolded instruction within the ZPD of their students (Snowman and McCown, 2013). In other words, a teacher must be able to assist children in achieving a goal that may be slightly too difficult for them to achieve alone. An example of this would be if a teacher had decided that her class should do an experiment on how well plants grow based on the amount of water they receive, she could challenge her students to make a hypothesis about what they think will happen. This teacher could allow her students to individually plant their seeds and then guide her students to predict or hypothesize what they think will happen if one plant gets more water than another. This example directly correlates with Vygotsky’s idea of ZPD because the students do not know how to use the scientific method for they are only preschoolers; however, with the teacher’s assistance, they were able to fully complete

Every student in an educator’s class is going to come with knowledge on all different types of views of the world, so it is important that teachers encourage their children to share these viewpoints with others in the class. For example, a first grade teacher wants to talk about the speed of objects, so she pairs off her students and has them create paper airplanes. Since each child has most likely made or seen another person make a paper airplane, they already have an idea of how to begin. The trick to this; however, is that both students may have a different idea on how to make this paper airplane, so they will have to learn from each other’s past experiences in order to successfully complete the task at hand. This idea of incorporating differing viewpoints supports Vygotsky’s theory that children learn from their experiences in the world. By accepting another person’s viewpoint on making a paper airplane, a student will be able to add those ideas to their previously constructed knowledge, which supports Piaget’s theory of children accommodating new information into their existing