Category: Classroom Community

Scaffolding and Peer-learning: Thinking about Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”

When a student is struggling with a problem, and they just need that little boost to get them to the next level, they’re in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, and it’s appropriate for the teacher to give them that crucial bit of help. The idea implies that students really have been trying to solve the problem so the help they get will be useful.

It also implies that the teacher can recognize precisely the help they need and deliver it, which is often easier than it sounds. As an adult, from a different generation and culture, and with more experience with these problems, I see problems very differently from my students. Indeed, experts solve problems by developing rules of thumb (heuristics) that speed problem solving by amalgamating large volumes of information. Unfortunately, for these heuristics to be meaningful, students often have to arrive at them themselves. Thus the student looking at the details is unable to communicate effectively with the expert who sees the big picture.

Peer-Teaching

One remedy Vygotsky advocated was peer-teaching. By letting students of similar but differing abilities work in groups, they can help each other: often a lot more effectively than a teacher would be able to. The teacher’s main interventions can be with the more advanced students who do not have anyone more knowledgeable to help, but who are best able to communicate with the teacher because of a smaller knowledge gap.

Practically, this suggests multi-aged classrooms, and a high level of vertical integration of the subject matter. Consider, for example, which topics from algebra, geometry and calculus might be appropriate for students from middle to high school to be working on together at the same time in the same room.

Scaffolding

Another, more typical, approach to this problem would be to provide all the extensive scaffolding – all the information including explicit demonstrations of ways of thought – that students need to get started, and then gradually take the scaffolding away so that they have to apply it all on their own.

In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own.

Slavin (2005) (online resources): Classroom Applications of Vygotsky’s Theory.

In Combination

Elements of both these approaches are necessary – and they’re not mutually exclusive. The scaffolding perspective is most important when introducing something completely new, because they’re all novices at that point. But as you build it into the classroom culture in a multi-aged classroom where there is institutional memory and peer-teaching, then the job of the teacher evolves more into maintaining the standards and expectations, and reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for repeatedly providing the full scaffolding.

Coon Creek Immersion: Visiting the Cretaceous

70 million year old shell and its imprint collected at the Coon Creek Science Center.

Just got back from our immersion trip to collect Cretaceous fossils at the Coon Creek Science Center, and hiking in Natchez Trace State Park.

It was an excellent trip. Despite the cold, Pat Broadbent did her usual, excellent job explaining the geology of Coon Creek and showing us how to collect and preserve some wonderful specimens. Back at the cabins, we looked at some of the microfossils from the Coon Creek sediments (and some other microscopic crystals); similar fossils can tell us a lot about the Earth’s past climate.

Back at the Park, we traced a streamline from the watershed divide to its marshy estuary, and cooked an excellent seafood dinner as we learned about the major organ systems.

Dinner was delicious.

Our trip was not without difficulties, however. The group learned a bit more about self-regulation, governance and the balance of powers, as a consequence of “The Great Brownie Incident,” and the, “P.E. Fiasco.”

We were also fairly well cut off from the “cloud”: no internet, and you could only get cell reception if you were standing in the middle of the road in just the right spot in front of Cabin #3.

But more on these later. I have some sleep to catch up on.


View Coon Creek Immersion in a larger map

Moral Development in the Brain

If someone takes something of yours from your locker, does it matter if they intended to steal, or if they grabbed it by mistake because they thought it was their locker? We see there is a moral difference here, because people’s intentions and beliefs matter. An inadvertent mistake is one thing, but intentionally stealing is another.

We can see the difference, but typically, children under six do not. They see both things as just as bad, because they do not consider intentions.

The temporoparetial junctions. Image by the Database Center for Life Science, via Wikimedia Commons.

A recent study (Young et al., 2010) found the part of the brain that seems to be responsible for the consideration of intentions in moral judgment. This part of the brain, the right temporoparietal junction, develops between the ages of six and eleven.

I find this work fascinating because it implies that adolescents may still be developing the ability for deeper moral judgment when they get to middle school. It would help explain why they will sometimes make the argument that if the outcome did no harm then any transgression does not matter; taking something from someone’s locker is not that important if they get caught at it and have to return it.

Just like adolescents have to exercise our abstract thinking skills in order to fully develop and hone them, students probably need to practice and think about what morality means.

I think I’m going to have to figure out a framework for talking about morality for next cycle’s Personal World.

Note: Another interesting article on the role of the temporoparietal junction in meta-cognition.

The positive side of teasing

Teasing, under some circumstances, might actually help people bond. At least according to Dacher Keltner of the Greater Good Science Center.

Teasing can be a way to diffuse embarrassing situations, but its effect depends very much on the context and the culture. The outstanding question is how we differentiate positive teasing among friends from verbal attempts to bully. Part of the answer to this question lies in the effect: does the teasing contribute to group cohesion, or does it isolate and exclude?

Boys, girls, and blogs

There’s a curious and clear gender difference when it comes to my student’s use of their blogs. All the girls have them and most are posting things right now, but the boys don’t.

This is in large part due to the way I rolled out the student blogs. I started with a couple students (girls) who were most interested, and since then I’ve been setting up blogs for students as they’ve been requested. The process has been slow because I’ve been trying the multi-user version of WordPress (WPMU), which is not nearly as easy to set up as a stand-alone WordPress installation (like the one used for the Muddle). I think, however, that I have the setup process worked out now, so I could accelerate the rollout if necessary.

Since the two students I started with were girls, it’s perhaps not too surprising that it’s the other girls who were most interested in getting their own. That’s the way the social connections are arranged in our class.

Scattergram showing how girls' (red) brains mature differently than boys' (blue). Data from Lenroot, 2007.

Though there’s no real evidence for it, I do wonder, however, if there is a gender component to it too. Since girls tend to develop more quickly than boys at this age (see Sax, 2007 for a general description, and NIH, 2010 for a recent overview of adolescent brain development), so perhaps they’re more self-reflective. Girls also tend to emphasize interpersonal relationships more (e.g. Johnson, 2004), and are generally more communicative.

… females (1) develop more intimate friendships, (2) stress the importance of maintaining intimacy, and (3) expect more intimacy in their friendships than do males. — in Gender, grade, and relationship differences in emotional closeness within adolescent friendships by Johnson, (2004)

At any rate, I’m curious to see how this develops. I think I’m going to remind the whole class about the blogs though.

(Excel Spreadsheet used to create the brain volume scattergram: here.)

The cynic’s guide to argument

This guide, from a longtime commenter on Megan McArdle’s blog, does an excellent, if cynical, job of explaining how to win an online argument. It includes:

  • Using allusions to make you look smarter (Wikipedia is a great resource for finding quick facts).
  • Treating stupid questions as if they are serious (this one could actually help the conversation).
  • Treating serious questions as though they’re stupid (great way to score points, but do not contribute to a good discussion).
  • Admitting any and all faults you are accused of (this diffuses the bottom two argument styles in Graham’s hierarchy: name-calling and ad-hominem attacks.)
  • Asking earnest questions instead of making arguments (which can be very useful in pointing out the complexities of a situation.)
  • Never pulling rank. Let your credibility (ethos) be based on what your argue, not on how much education/training/experience you have (credibility is important, and so is experience, but pulling rank tends to annoy people and that will loose you friends.)
  • Being brief (snappy one-liners may not have the depth of a well reasoned argument but are more likely to win friends).

Most of these techniques are appeals to the emotions (pathos). They can, and may sometimes need to, be used to support a good, well reasoned, argument (logos).

[B]efore some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. – Aristotle in On Rhetoric

Be careful how you use these things, and watch out for them, because they don’t only occur online, you’ll see them often in any conversation.

Critical Reading

With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence. – Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.

Cuesta College has a nice but fairly dense webpage on, “Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information“.

It starts with distinguishing between facts and opinions, goes into evaluating arguments and rounds up with asking critical questions. There’s lots of good information, but it needs to be parsed, broken apart, and condensed for middle school students.

Facts are statements that can be verified or proven to be true or false. Factual statements from reliable sources can be accepted and used in drawing conclusions, building arguments, and supporting ideas.

Opinions are statements that express feelings, attitudes, or beliefs and are neither true nor false. Opinions must be considered as one person’s point of view that you are free to accept or reject. With the exception of informed ones, opinions have little use as supporting evidence, but they are useful in shaping and evaluating your own thinking. [My emphasis]
– Critically Evaluating the Logic and Validity of Information from Cuesta College.

This can be tied in with my previous notes on Paul Graham’s Hierarchy of Disagreement to create a set of lessons on critical thinking and evaluation.

Paul Graham's Hierachy of Disagreement (image adapted from Wikipedia).