Education Shortform
The ZPD… in a Nutshell
In a nutshell
Many thanks for reading these short education summaries. You can use the index to explore others, or scroll through via the links at the end of this piece.
These pieces have covered an A–Z of educational concepts, and Z has to stand for the ZPD or zone of proximal development.
This idea, based on the work of Russian psychologist and educator Lev Vygotsky, suggests that target learning can be either within a reachable zone where they are ready to learn it, or too distant. It makes sense to teach students what they are psychologically ready for; learning therefore can’t be seen as just a matter of input, but depends on the learner’s ability to form cognitive structures, something that is expanded with the help of teachers or peers.
Later researchers developed an easy-to-understand metaphor for how the ZPD can be reached — scaffolding. Just like the framework that allows a building to be constructed, scaffolding is the instructional guidance that a teacher or peer provides in the classroom as a learner is working towards understanding a new concept.
In effect, scaffolding via a hint or prompt helps a learner to move from their current state of knowledge into the ZPD.
Other classroom practices which could serve this purpose include encouragement, demonstrations, examples, peer modelling. In short, any way that a teacher or instructor advances a learner’s state of understanding, helping them to move from A to B (and eventually to Z).
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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