Scaffolding and The Zone of Proximal Development
Two of the most important terms in a teacher’s repertoire, and two of the most popular teaching ideologies in education right now, scaffolding and the Zone of Proximal Development are simple yet elegant ways to describe how teachers build on a student’s current knowledge so they can ascend to ever higher plateaus. The unessay is nothing if not a product of scaffolding and the ZPD.
Using Wikipedia’s definitions, which are more than adequate for understanding these terms, scaffolding is ” a learning process designed to promote a deeper level of learning. Scaffolding is the support given during the learning process which is tailored to the needs of the student with the intention of helping the student achieve his/her learning goals. Instructional scaffolding is the provision of sufficient support to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced to students. These supports may include the following: resources, a compelling task, modeling a task, providing coaching. These supports are gradually removed as the students develop autonomous learning strategies, thus promoting their own cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning skills and knowledge. Teachers help the students master a task or a concept by providing support.
And the Zone of Proximal Development is ” the difference between what a learner can do without help and what she or he can do with help.” Beginning as a small circle in the middle, signifying what the learner can do unaided, and branching out in concentric circles of increasing size, with each circle further from the center denoting the need for increasingly more aid for the student.”
The terms are so similar they have come to be used almost interchangeably, so for the sake of clarity I will use the ZPD to describe both. Further defined in “Vygotsky, Tutoring, and Learning” we can see the theoretical principles of the unessay at work: “Vygotsky’s definition of the ZPD leaves open to us the task of identifying the nature of the guidance and collaboration that promotes development and a need to specify what gets learned during the course of a given history of tutor/learner interaction” (Wood 5). The nature of guidance in the unessay operates off of an assumption: that university students are capable and proficient writers. The results of the unessay as well as blog assignments have demonstrated this, according to the both Michael and Dan. Michael and Dan assumed that the writing itself was not the issue, rather, it was the form the writing was forced to adhere to which gave student’s difficulties.
The traditional essay is foreign and awkward to many, meaning it is not a part of a student’s ZPD, and if it is part of her ZPD, it is to such slight degree that she is unable to perform adequately without guidance. This is where the unessay comes in, as the bridging device between a student’s ZPD and the plateau the teacher wants her to be at. You don’t go from walking up a hill to scaling Everest, nor do you go from writing rigid five-paragraph essays to the intricate and nuanced essays expected in university. ZPD and scaffolding ” emphasize that learning is a complex process that depends, in large part, on changes that occur in a learner’s strategic knowledge, domain-specific knowledge, and motivation” (Harris 297). Once these skills are fostered and added to the student’s current body of knowledge then the ZPD expands and you can slowly pull off the ‘writing-trainin-wheels,’ so to speak.
Works Referenced
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Instructional_scaffolding&oldid=548517392
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Zone_of_proximal_development&oldid=558276245
Harris, Karen R., Steve Graham, and Linda H. Mason. “Improving the Writing, Knowledge, and Motivation of Struggling Young Writers: Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development with and Without Peer Support.” American Educational Research Journal 43.2 (2006): 295–340. JSTOR. Web. 26 June 2013
Wood, David, and Heather Wood. “Vygotsky, Tutoring and Learning.” Oxford Review of Education 22.1 (1996): 5–16. JSTOR. Web. 29 June 2013.
