Lesson 3 - Vygotky's Sociocultural Development

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Presentation of Theoretical Construct

Reading: Chapter 2
  
 

Lecture Information: Assisted Learning Strategies

This page is dedicated to actual hands-on techniques that comply with Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory of Cognitive Development.  Below is a list of ways to help students access, refine, & control their learning more effectively.  The term that is used most commonly is scaffolding.  That is fairly descriptive of what the role of a teacher is for Vygotsky.  The teacher builds the scaffolding that guides the experience of the learner/student but doesn't do too much for them.  Just like scaffolding allows builders to effectively construct a house; the point of the whole endeavor is not the scaffolding but the resulting house.  It is the same in teaching, scaffolding helps to build the understanding. 

Scaffolding Techniques:

  • Prompts/Cuing - Very small corrective direction from the knower/facilitator.  A teacher is walking around the room while the students are writing an essay and the teacher calls out, "Commas!" meaning everybody take a look at your usage of commas in your essay. 

  • 1/2 done examples - A recognizable but still incomplete example of the project that you have assigned.  You provide a notebook sized sketch of the movie poster of the short story that you have just gone over in class while their assignment is a full sized poster  You really need to be careful here as well.  Don't provide them with too much.  The onus must still be on the student. 

  • Thinking aloud - The teacher demonstrates the thought processes that they want from the students by talking through an example exercise right in front of them.  As you go through the geometry proof you are talking the reasoning process, the axioms, theorems, or corollaries  for the students.

  • Modeling - Demonstrating the behavior, reasoning, and ethics that you want from you students.  The safety rules & procedures are the same teachers as well as the students.  They are watching you, and will be more inclined to do what you do rather than do what you say.

  • Reciprocal Teaching - exchange the teacher and student roles occasionally to check for understanding.  Have a rotation of student presentations on a portion of the content for the English grammars class.

  • Checklists/Rubrics - Provide the students with a list of all steps in a procedure to help them to self-regulate.  You provide a grid of all 72 steps in learning how to swim and simply write in the date when each step is completed. 


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