Secondary Education: The Key Concepts

Jerry Wellington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134288298
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

A comprehensive critical survey of the controversies, theories and practices central to secondary education today, this book provides teachers, researchers, parents and policy-makers with a vital new reference resource. It covers important topics including:

• assessment
• citizenship
• curriculum
• e-learning
• exclusion
• theories of learning
• work experience.

Fully cross-referenced, with extensive suggestions for further reading and on-line resources, this is an essential guide to theory and practice in the twenty-first century classroom.

ZONE OF PROXIMAL DEVELOPMENT

The zone of proximal development, sometimes called the ZPD or the Zo-ped, is the ‘area’ between the level at which students know something or can do something on their own, and the level of performance or skill they could reach given the right support, teaching or structured learning. This is a crucially important idea for the classroom teacher because it provides a way of visualising the area that they should be aiming at or constructing in their teaching—it is the area or zone where teachers should be ‘pitching’ their lesson. If they succeed in targeting this zone, teachers and mentors often say that they are ‘pitching their lesson at the right level’. Another way of putting it is to call it the zone where there is a ‘manageable level of difficulty’ for the student (Berk, 2003, p.258). It can also help to think of it as a zone of potential development.

The ZPD is an idea created by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The ZPD is the zone between what the child or student already knows and where he or she could be if given the right kind of support and intervention by a teacher. This intervention might be direct teaching or it could be ‘scaffolding’, in which the right learning and teaching environment can gradually bring the student up to a higher level (just as scaffolding can enable a solid and permanent building to be constructed). The skill in scaffolding, and in teaching generally, involves breaking things down into manageable learning steps.

A slightly broader concept than scaffolding was given the term ‘guided participation’ (Rogoff, 1990, 1991). She used this idea to stress the importance of teacher/adult/parent and the learner in co-operating together in the ZPD.

The ideas of a ‘zone’ and ‘scaffolding’ are useful metaphors for considering learning at all levels. Teachers should aim to target the ZPD in order for progression to take place. If they aim too high, i.e. way above the ‘target zone’, then no learning will take place (except perhaps rote learning, ‘parrot fashion’). If teachers aim too low, then the learner will not progress:

Learning which is oriented toward developmental levels that have already been reached is ineffective from the viewpoint of the child’s overall development. It does not aim for a new stage of the developmental process but rather lags behind this process.

(Vygotsky, 1978)

Pitching learning and teaching at the right level is crucial for motivation and the affective domain: if there is no challenge, the learner is bored and apathetic; too much challenge leaves the learner frustrated and disaffected.

Figure 9 shows an illustration of the ZPD. The shaded zone, Region 1, represents the learner’s current development. Region 2 is the ZPD representing the learner’s potential development in the near future. As learning proceeds, a portion of the ZPD becomes part of the learner’s present knowledge or skill and so a smaller ZPD remains. The arrows in Figure 9 represent learning, leading towards new development.

Vygotsky (1978) defined the ZPD as ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’. In other words, a student can perform a task under adult guidance or with peer collaboration that could not be achieved alone. The zone of proximal development bridges the gap between what is known and what can be known. Vygotsky claimed that learning occurred in this zone.

His view is that the social environment and social interaction, not least talking, is vital in promoting learning. The role of the teacher is to create this environment for learning to take place. Thought, language and learning go together. For scaffolding to be successful, it must provide step-by-step progression (no huge jumps), the correct ‘pacing’, a structured environment and (not least) motivation and interest for the learner.

Vygotsky’s model of learning can apply as valuably to on-line (or e-) learning as it can in face-to-face situations. Students can use on-line communication to create a learning community, to collaborate and to learn from each other—especially if this is facilitated by guidance and scaffolding by a teacher or on-line tutor.

Figure 9 One way of picturing the ZPD

Related ideas

The notion of a ZPD relates to, at the very least, two other ideas about learning. The first is diagnostic assessment: if teachers wish to pitch their lesson at the right level, i.e. in the ZPD, they need to know first the level that ‘students are at’. The second is the idea of meaningful learning: learning will only be meaningful if it is pitched at the right level and built on a foundation of previous learning—scaffolding can help to make learning meaningful by taking learning up to the next storey in a sound and structured way, as opposed to jumping up to an unrealistic level which is unsupported, disconnected and left hanging in the air. As you can see, there is no limit to the metaphors that can be lifted from the construction industry in considering learning: foundations, bridging gaps, scaffolding, zones, storeys and things left hanging!!

One final important point about the ZPD is that it is not some sort of property or characteristic of the learner alone. It is certainly not some sort of entity or zone in the learner’s brain that the teacher should ‘aim at’—rather, it is an area or zone constructed by the interaction between the learner and the teacher or adult.

References and further reading

Berk, L. (2003) Child Development, 6th edn, Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Rogoff, B. (1990) Apprenticeship in Thinking, New York: Oxford University Press.

——(1991) Cognitive Development in Social Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scaife, J. (2000) ‘Learning in Science’, in Wellington, J. (ed.) Teaching and Learning Secondary Science, London: Routledge.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Mental Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Useful websites

There is a vast number of websites on the ZPD (try Google or Google Scholar to find several hundred). Two of the more readable and valuable are:

http://chd.gse.gmu.edu/immersion/knowledgebase/theorists/constructivism/vygotsky.htm

Too little challenge leaves the learner bored, and too much leaves him frustrated’:

http://chss2.montclair.edu/sotillos/_meth/00000014.htm

For Barbara Rogoff’s work, see:

http://psych.ucsc.edu/faculty/brogoff/index.php?Bio

Table 1 Comparison between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced assessment

Norm-referenced assessment	Criterion-referenced assessment
Shows an individual’s relative standing incomparison to a known group, e.g. class, regional cohort, national cohort or theglobal age group	A test or type of assessment that provides a measure of performance in terms of a clearly defined set of goals, standards or competences
Is all about comparison and discriminationbetween students Involves ranking	May help to improve co-operation and lessen the effects of competition Should not compare and discriminate
Is not appropriate for diagnostic ...