Vygotsky and Meaningful Learning

While synthesizing the weather and climate standard in groups last week I began to realize the shift to be made in terms of my thinking as a teacher to become a better designer—it’s time to get away from thinking about a particular SOL and find some way to make it truly make sense! A more holistic approach in comparison to the focus on the one piece. Breaking the standard apart with SPD, was a start.  It made me think deeper about the content I want my students to learn, I was thinking more about what the kids might already know and how to bridge any gaps, and my mind was going in circles coming up with the discourse and ways to make meaningful activities. It was much more rewarding than my typical weekly planning where I complete a weekly chart and sprinkle in a few objectives, procedures, and materials.  The driving questions we must hone in on as we go down this journey to become better designers are what do the kids have to know, and how can we present the material to them in a manner that also prepares them for their future? 

Now to Vygotsky—while educational psychology undergrad classes have been some time ago, reading Vygotsky’s Mind in Society brought back many memories from that class.  I’ll admit, psychology has never been my forte, and at times the book was challenging to read, however, Vygotsky’s work truly is revolutionary.  It’s amazing, too, to think that all of his experiments and works were occurring during such a tumultuous time in history!  As educators, a big point of Vygotsky’s that we utilize is to ensure students have sufficient exposure, and then model, coach, and fade them across the finish line of the ZPD! In my classroom I think about my community of students and the wide array of upbringings those kids have had. Some certainly with more exposure to the content than others which, in turn, makes it easier for them to master the concept.  However, sticking with the model, coach, and fade method, along with doing the magic that we teachers do (heterogeneous grouping, varying strategies, sufficient practice, just naming a few) we can aide in getting students across the ZPD.  In short with Vygotsky, his emphasis on play as learning and symbolic tools directly tied in with our learning principle. We must find ways to design experiences to best teach these tools.   

Further reflecting on my undergrad educational psychology course and in particular, Piaget, although that class might seem like some it’s from some bygone era circa 2010, I do think about some of the things I learned from that course often.  When I find myself wondering WHY DON’T THESE KIDS UNDERSTAND HOW TO FIND X…I remind myself, they’re still very concrete thinkers and those abstract concepts take time. It’s easy to forget sometimes that each of our students enter our classroom with different experiences, different personalities, and different ways of learning.  Our challenge is doing what we can to best meet those differences, and that goes full circle back to the importance of model, coach, and fade method. 

Finally, tying together my teaching practices with practices in class— it seems I wasn’t alone with my struggle reading Vygotsky, but we came to class and followed our weekly procedures:. interacting with the text, getting the essentials, making sense of it, and putting it all together. While it doesn’t sound like an overly complex design, it works, at least, I left class with a much deeper understanding of Mind in Society. So, I started thinking about how our design pattern in class, relates to the design pattern in Mr. Turner’s room. I suppose in my 7^th grade math setting our interacting with the content occurs with the activity we do, for instance, in today’s lesson we did a Scavenger Hunt on Scientific Notation and Powers of Ten where students in group tackled many examples around the room. The getting the guts comes from discussion and notes, ensuring guts have meaning is shown with practice and group work.  Then we put everything together with an exit activity of some sort. My goal over the next few years is to improve with implementing projects that take the place of the notes or incorporate; give those students a chance to tackle the material like they’re experts!