Sunday, September 27, 2009

Vygotsky

The first time I was introduced to Vygotsky was in my P-251 class last year. We talked a lot about the ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) and his ideas on learning. ZPD basically talks about what a child knows vs. what they don’t know. It also talks about the different stages a child goes through in order to learn new information.

In the classroom we are constantly trying to help children expand on their knowledge. We as teachers are constantly teaching the students new material as well as build off knowledge that they already have. As a teacher it is important to use ZPD in your class because it is very useful in identifying where students are in their learning and how much more you can do for them to help them grow.

I never thought about how much of these practices were implemented into daily teachings. When I would do math homework in 5th grade my teacher would circle the problems we got wrong on the homework and hand it back to us. She would have us take them home and try and correct what we did wrong. During our morning exercises she would walk around and check our corrected problems. If we had questions she would answer them and if we still had problems wrong she would have us stay after school or during recess. By doing this she was helping me and my other classmates learn from our mistakes so we could further our knowledge in math.

I think once I become a teacher I will definitely stress to my students that it is okay to ask for help. You don’t want them to feel like they can’t come talk to you when they don’t understand a certain topic. If you don’t establish that in the beginning it could hinder how far they go along in their knowledge and understanding of new topics.

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