Greetings and welcome to Volume 4 of our EdHistory 101 Project, our periodic revisiting of key historical events, personalities and perspectives that continue to shape our ideas of school. Knowing our nation’s educational history—the forces, beliefs, and language of other times—presents opportunities for us to reconsider the roles we need school to play for the social and intellectual well-being of our young people. It’s a way for us to assess the prevailing values, to re-frame our work and, with persistence, to re-imagine the systems, culture, and practices that cement the grammar of schooling.
The past two decades of education policy have privileged “standards” and “norms” at the expense of teacher passion and student curiosity and engagement. These days, we seem less able to root our work as we once did in the thinking of giants in the field of learning psychology and educational philosophy. Its been some time since I taught education courses or supervised new and practicing teachers, but from recent conversations with younger educators, names like Dewey, James, Piaget, Comer, and Sizer are seldom recognized. Some of Benjamin Bloom’s work survives since his cognitive framework lends itself to the prevailing fixation on organization and measurement, and his belief in the potential of “mastery learning” which provides an appealing rationale but, under various names, has never proven itself effective. Few, however, remember and recount Bloom’s other key assertions regarding a psycho-motor (action) domain or an affective (emotion-based) domain, even in this time of “SEL” measurements and curriculum.
In this edition of our EdHistory 101 Project we remind ourselves of the work of Lev Vygotsky, whose early 20th century work provided an enduring and sociocultural theory of child development we would be well-served to re-visit and resume in practice. As the education sector struggles to find its footing after the demise of standards, norms and measurement, there are reminders from Vygotsky of how young people grow and learn.
“Learning is more than the acquisition
of the ability to think; it is the acquisition
of many specialized abilities for thinking
about a variety of things.”
-Lev Vygotsky
Vygotsky’s short career, he died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37, focused on child development, developmental psychology, and educational philosophy. Cultural mediation. Inner speech. The more knowledgeable other. The zone of proximal development. These are key concepts and familiar terms he developed and explained. He is also remembered for his studies and recognition of the key role of play in learning and development and for his insistence that “all learning is social”, an oft-quoted but seldom fully-explored nod to Vygotsky’s legacy. Early in his career, Vygotsky delivered what was at the time a revolutionary theory: innate abilities affect the development and self-realization of children, but do not necessarily rigidly fix or shape them. Vygotsky believed that young people learn a great deal through physical interaction and asserted that learning is first and foremost a social process in which society and parents play a key role.
Two Breakthroughs in his field
The Zone of Proximal Development As his studies in 1920’s Moscow deepened, Vygotsky authored a concept he called the “Zone of Proximal Development” (ZPD), perhaps most easily defined as the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. He wrote, “What lies in the zone of proximal development at one stage is realized and moves to the level of actual development at a second. In other words, what the child is able to do in collaboration today he will be able to do independently tomorrow.”
As stated above, given his recognition of social forces in learning, Vygotsky identified that a key component in the successful attainment of skills and concepts was working in collaboration with parents, peers, teachers, etc., as he termed them, the “more knowledgeable others”. The notion of “ZPD” provided psychologists from across the globe with a new approach to assessing and measuring fundamental developmental processes.
Inner Speech As part of his framework for intellectual growth Vygotsky also coined the term “inner speech” to explain the process by which the private speech of young children, talking to themselves out loud during play, starts accompanying their activity in a variety of cognitive tasks. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains inner speech as “the little voice in the head”, or “thinking in words”. Its importance, they suggest, is that it is a phenomenon where several topics intersect: language, consciousness, thought, imagery, communication, imagination, and self-knowledge; all appear to connect in some way or other to the little voice in the head.
Studies of inner speech have continued, expanded, and intensified over the century since Vygotsky coined the term, becoming both interdisciplinary and discipline-specific. There is general recognition that inner speech is a regular daily experience with significant links to self-awareness, short-term memory, cognition and development, yet researchers from many fields have cited the many challenges in furthering its study. Recently, advances in neuro-imaging and related brain study advances have rekindled interest, as have the recognition of possible links to autism, schizophrenia,
As explained in the neuroscience journal Grey Matters, “inner speech holds a pivotal role in multiple mental processes. There is evidence of its involvement in the development of social behavior, cognitive tasks, self-awareness, and even confidence in oneself. Although researchers have made connections between many of these findings, the methodology for studying inner speech is rudimentary and in need of improvement.”
Vygotsky Family Archives
Two Giants Agree, Mostly
While Vygotsky never chanced to meet Jean Piaget, another giant of learning science, he was familiar with his works, agreeing on many of his perspectives. Piaget believed there were universal stages of development that all children naturally pass through. Vygotsky posed that learning happens through social interactions and is therefore greatly dependent on experiences which can differ greatly. In the early 1930’s Vygotsky came to a different theoretical position from Piaget on the topic of “inner speech”. Piaget had speculated that “egocentric speech” follows from inner speech and "dissolved away" as children matured. Vygotsky’s studies demonstrated that egocentric speech became inner speech, and then into what we call "thoughts". After reading Vygotsky's work after his death, Piaget openly praised him for his discovery of the social origin of children's thoughts, reasoning, and moral judgements.
How Remembering Vygotsky Might Help Us
Make activities accessible yet stimulating From a Vygotskian perspective, ability or the lack thereof, is not genetic. A young person will learn most effectively if the concept or skill is within their ZPD. Activities that are too challenging will likely open the child to failure and affect their confidence as a learner. Similarly, as noted by Philip Adey, “the under-stimulated child does not develop their intelligence as they should”. Recent research has shown continued and growing student frustration with boring classroom activities. One can only conclude that a failure to engage young people’s powerful curiosity is a primary reason behind our ongoing flat achievement.
Formative assessment should be much more than a quiz on Friday A student’s learning goals and instructional activities must be personalized to his/her needs and abilities to the greatest extent possible. Formative assessments, as well as instructional variation, should be dynamic and part of school-wide conversations. Success should be measured in terms of progress from prior levels, in line with his/her dynamic and changing zones of proximal development.
Scaffolding and modeling should be integral Scaffolding and modeling are at the core of the ZPD model. Fortunately, modelling and scaffolding are more commonplace in today’s classrooms in education. A core tenet of Vygotsky’s work is to ensure that scaffolding is geared toward the ZPD of the relevant learner, as opposed to the “one-size-fits-all” approach that many teachers adopt to enable them to hurtle through material for the sake of upcoming tests. Scaffolding, for example, should involve leading questioning and prompting the child to succeed in undertaking the challenging task themselves, rather than offering a sentence starter/word bank/fill-in-the-blank approach to complete the task.
Our over-reliance on standards, norms, and measurements has not been good for student engagement and teacher autonomy over the past two decades and we’re paying a price. Remembering the tenets of learning, growing, and teaching, and what Vygotsky discovered can be help us remember what matters in classrooms and relationships.
Thanks to Wendy Paterson, Russia Beyond, Frontiers, Grey Matters, & Teaching Times
We’re hoping you’ll join an EdHistory 101 Project reading group or form your own. We invite you to copy the link text to read and discuss it with colleagues, to make time to refresh our role as the intellectual hubs of our communities. Watch out, minds at work!