ZPD Paper

Fishing and Vygotsky's Concept of Effective Education

Author(s): Beth McCulloch Vinson

Source: Young Children , January 2001, Vol. 56, No. 1 (January 2001), pp. 88-89

Published by: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/42727908

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Fishing and tygotsky's Concept of Effective Education

M

Beth McCulloch Vinson

Lev scaffolding two Vygotsky educational is and well the concepts: known zone for of two educational concepts: scaffolding and the zone of

proximal development. In construc- tion work, scaffolds allow workers to reach heights they would be unable to otherwise. As workers complete their construction, they require fewer and fewer supports. This is the same in the case of Vygotsky's con- cept of instructional scaffolding.

Teachers and children's slightly more capable peers provide chil- dren with scaffolds that allow them

to attain educational goals. Scaf- folds can be words a tutor uses to

explain concepts that are unclear in a passage the child is reading. Scaf- folds also can be drawings a tutor uses to show relationships between things being studied. A scaffold is anything that a teacher or a peer tu- tor provides that enables the child to perform a skill or master a concept.

The zone of proximal develop- ment is that area of cognitive devel- opment in which children can learn with instructional scaffolding. In a pictorial sense, Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal develop- ment looks like the continuum

shown on the right.

Beth McCulloch Vinson, Ed.S., Ph.D., is an assistant professor of elementary edu- cation at Athens State University in Ala- bama. Primarily she teaches mathematics methods courses and specializes in the studies of math anxiety reduction and the use of manipulatives.

While most undergraduate teacher education students correctly match Vygotsky's name with his concepts in a couple of multiple-choice ques- tions, I prefer to relate Vygotsky's zone of proximal development to a fa- vorite fishing story of mine. Translat- ing the concept into a story enables me to make fuller sense of Vygotsky's theory and gives my students a use- ful metaphor for going beyond sim- ply identifying the researcher with the two concepts for which he is known. In effect, the story serves as a scaffold for my students.

The físh story

One day my husband took me on a fishing trip to the city lake. This was a break from my own graduate studies at the time and an upcom- ing test on Vygotsky, which was more on my mind than the possibil- ity of a fish fry. In the little boat I

watched as my husband care- fully selected, from a rainbow of fishing bait, an orange and yellow plastic worm with glit- tery specks inside. Then he picked up a bottle of liquid fish smells and pumped the mist all over the bait. Curious, I asked the reason for all the fuss. "You

want to catch a fish don't you?" he said. "Well, fish are picky, and you have to put something on your hook that will catch

r their attention. They have to see something flashy and

smell something good." I thought about the similari-

ties between fishing and teach- ing. Once teachers are teaching

within their children's zones of proxi- mal development, then they must catch children's attention to move

them forward in their development.

Techniques and process

Before this trip, fishing was to me a relentless series of casting and reeling. So I thrust the bait into the water and reeled in very quickly. "Hey, hey, hey, slow down," my hus- band cautioned. "You want to catch

a fish don't you? Well, you have to cast it out and then let the weight take your bait down to where the fish are. You have to reel at just the right pace. If you reel too slowly, the fish aren't attracted enough to go over to the bait. If you reel too quickly, they won't even go for it. The best way is to reel and stop, reel and stop, reel and stop."

I thought about how effective teachers mimic this same pattern by instructing, modeling, and demon-

Zone of Proximal Development

Task level

too easy - ^ 1 appropriate too difficult Result

boredom learning frustration

Scaffolding none - - - • - • - - some - - ■ - • - r- - much

88 Young Children • January 2001

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strating. Then they pause, checking for understanding and providing time for independent practice be- fore beginning instruction again.

My husband continued his in- struction, "Now, I want you to cast it all the way out to that dead tree that fell over into the water." I

asked him, "Why? I'll just get all tangled up in the branches." He re- minded me, "You want to catch a fish don't you? Well, that's where the fish are. You can cast out into the

middle of the lake all day long, but the fish are over there by that tree."

Relating this to children's learn- ing, we can complain all day long that our third-graders function more like second-graders and con- tinue to teach third-grade material. But if we want to teach them, we have to be in their zone of proximal development or else we are wasting our time. If children are just now ready for Chapter 3 con- cepts and we are on Chap- ter 7, then we are there without li them, just casting into an area where they are not going to be.

Can we call it fishing if we cast into an area where we know there

are no fish? Can we call it teaching when we teach far above the level

of our children? Probably not!

Assessing the catch

After I finally got the process worked out, I too was catching fish. It seemed to take forever for us to

catch the first fish, but after that first one, several followed. I asked about this and learned "it just seems to always turn out that way."

Although fish probably don't count being caught on a hook as being successful, they do follow the pattern in what other fish do. As a matter of fact, people who fish do the same. Once fish are being hauled in one after the other onto a boat, other boats arrive at the same location.

In teaching, generally we tend to discover why it is that another "teacher" is effective. Some chil-

dren are more easily tutored by a slightly more capable peer than by

the teacher attempting the same tutoring task. This tutor may be a peer whose zone of proximal devel- opment is just ahead of the child he or she is helping.

Some of the best teachers in our

classrooms are other children. The

reason is similar to the experience of climbing a rocky cliff. The person who helps us the most is not the leader at the top of the cliff but the person within arms' reach who has just passed over the difficult spot.

Along the continuum Is there ever a time when we

want to function outside our zone

of proximal development? Yes! Once we master something, it is somewhat revealing and gratifying to go back and do the easy task again. For example, elementary

school children having mas- tered long division

need an easy addition assignment here and

^ there so they can examine how far they have pro- gressed. They need a reminder that this once was a difficult task for

them and that current or future

tasks also can seem insurmount-

able at the onset.

Some adults probably could en- joy playing in a sandbox or coloring in a coloring book, but is that within the average adult's zone of proximal development? No. How- ever, since it is now easy and re- quires little cognitive effort, it could seem relaxing. On the other hand, overindulgence in the sand- box or in coloring would result in boredom for the adult.

Conclusion

With the right bait, the right reel- ing pace, and casting into the right area, I increased my chances of catching a fish. Similarly, in educa- tion we have to use the right bait (which is determined by how en- gaged children are in our activi- ties), and we must use the right

technique and progress at the right pace (which are evidenced in our children's success levels).

Through today's electronic fish finders, we can know where the fish are at various times of the day or the season. Through various infor- mal and formal testing, we can know the cognitive levels of chil- dren we teach. What we choose to

do when we find their zones of

proximal development and how or even whether or not we scaffold their

instruction, make the difference in effective or ineffective education.

For further reading

Good, T.L., & J.E. Brophy. 1991. Looking in classrooms. 5th ed. New York: Harper Collins.

Greenfield, P.M. 1984. Theory of the teacher in learning activities. In Every- day cognition: Its development in social context, eds. B. Rogoff & J. Lave, 117- 38. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Palincsar, A.S. 1986. The role of dialogue in providing scaffolding instruction. Educational Psychologist 21: 73-98.

Rogoff, B., & J. Wertsch, eds. 1984. Children's learning in the "zone" of proximal development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Slavin, R.E. 1994. Educational psychology : Theory and practice. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Tharp, R.G., & R. Gallimore. 1988. Rous- ing minds to life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. [1930-1935] 1978. Mind in so- ciety: The development of higher mental processes, eds. M. Cole, V. John- Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. [1934] 1987. The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1, eds. R. Rieber & A.S. Carton. New York: Plenum.

Wakefield, J.F. 1996. Educational psychol- ogy: Learning to be a problem solver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Wertsch, J.V. 1991. Vygotsky and the so- cial formation of mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wood, D.J., J.S. Bruner, & G Ross. 1976. The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychia- try 17: 89-100.

Copyright © 2001 by the National Associa- tion for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at www.naeyc.org/resources/journal.

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