I’ve recently taught my daughter to ride her bike and it’s amazing how much of a vicarious thrill you can get by watching a four year old do something that you’ve been able to do since you were four. Honestly, I don’t even enjoy riding a bike very much at this point. But I sure like watching her ride it. My review of watching your daughter ride her bike for the first time:
“Ten out of ten, would recommend. Makes you feel talented and smart. Makes you feel almost talented and smart enough to forget that she was the one who learned how to do it and not you.”
Not only was the experience exciting and fun, it brought to mind an important concept in education. As I was running along behind holding her seat it made me think of the Zone of Proximal Development and scaffolding. These two are members of an exclusive club of concepts that have stuck with me from my years earning my teaching certification. They are in the club because of the enduring way they have impacted the way that I think, act, and teach.
The Zone of Proximal Development is a concept developed by noted psychologist Lev Vygotsky in the 1930s and has had a major impact on the teaching profession ever since. It’s easy to understand if you think of teaching a child to ride a bike.
When it comes to teaching a child to ride a bike, some children are so young or unprepared that in order to get them to do all of the things that it would take to ride a bike, you would need several adults to help at once. Two people would be needed to hold each of little Mary’s feet to a pedal and then use the foot to push the pedal. Another adult would be needed to hold the bike up. Another would have to hold Mary’s two hands on the handlebars and steer the bike. In this case Mary may technically be riding a bike, but is not in any meaningful sense riding a bike. She can’t ride a bike in any meaningful sense, even with help.
On the other hand, some children are capable enough at riding a bike that they can do all aspects of riding without any help at all. In this case, you could give instructions to the child, “Push, Fred! Great job! Now keep those handlebars straight!” but you aren’t teaching Fred because he doesn’t need any instruction. And if I know kids, you are also getting some eye rolls from Fred.
However, most children learning to ride a bike lie somewhere between Mary and Fred and are therefore within the Zone of Proximal Development. You can define the Zone of Proximal Development as the space between what a child cannot do even with help and what a child can do without any help. In other words, a child who can’t ride a bike yet, but is ready to learn because they can do some of the bike riding. For example, they can pedal, but maybe need you to help with the balance.
The partner concept to the Zone of Proximal Development is scaffolding. Scaffolding is the support a student needs within the Zone of Proximal Development. In the case of teaching the child to ride a bike, scaffolding might consist of holding the seat to keep a child’s balance, reminding the child to keep pedaling, purchasing training wheels or a balance bike, or even encouraging the child to keep going when he or she is getting discouraged.
The educational application is that the Zone of Proximal Development is the area where teaching really matters and where learning really happens. Before the student gets to the zone the student doesn’t have enough foundational knowledge or skills to be able to make learning meaningful and afterward, the student isn’t being challenged to grow. But in the zone, the student is ready for learning. They can do enough of the skill or mental task to allow them to engage the parts of the skill or mental task that they currently need to practice. And scaffolding is the method by which students are able to advance quickly through the Zone of Proximal Development.
The ideas are both revolutionary and mundane. They are fairly simple and intuitive. People were using them to teach children to ride bikes and many other things long before Lev Vygotsky put titles to the concept and practice. And yet they are also landmark ideas within the field of education. They offer a usable vision for the key role of a teacher in the learning process and offer a more dynamic concept of how students learn than is offered by lecture based instruction. Most importantly to me, they are just useful. They inform so many practices that end up making a difference in the classroom. On that note, I would like to point out a number of those concepts. For the sake of my delicate typing fingers, I’ll also shorten Zone of Proximal Development to ZPD.
What to Do in the Classroom?
Classrooms are entirely open. The ZPD and Scaffolding offer simple and applicable purpose to that wide open space: place students in the ZPD and ask them to act while giving them the necessary support to succeed in the task you’ve given.
In a history class it might look like this. Students cannot, on their own, write a serious analysis of the motivations behind the United States’ entry into World War 2. Why? Because
They can’t envision what that analysis would look like.
They don’t know where to find material to help them consider the question.
The task is difficult enough that they may get discouraged.
But the writing and the thinking portions they are capable of. So what scaffolding will they need to succeed?
Parameters for how long the paper should be to engage in serious analysis.
Elements that the paper would need to have in order for it to engage in serious analysis.
A suggested outline so that the students can focus on the analysis.
Reading material to prompt thinking and present students with major arguments on the issue.
Opportunities to ask for help and to get feedback on a rough draft.
For an art class it would be different. Students cannot, on their own, paint a landscape of the quality that I want them to produce. Why? Because
They aren’t skilled enough at mixing color to produce realistic landscape colors
They aren’t practiced enough at perspective to create realistic proportions and relationships.
However, they do have enough skill to create the right shapes on the canvas, use shading, etc. So what scaffolding will they need to succeed?
A cheat sheet for mixing certain colors.
Help mixing colors they just aren’t getting.
A lesson on perspective with examples.
A chance to practice techniques following a painting done by the teacher.
Feedback as they paint their own landscapes.
Do you see what I mean? The ZPD and scaffolding as a pair are just incredibly applicable. They are easy to use and result in really great classroom activities.
Isolation
The reason why scaffolding is so important and why it works so well is based on the reason why a student lies within the ZPD for a given task. Students are in the ZPD either because they can’t do one or more skills necessary to a task. Or they are in the ZPD because they can do all the necessary skills, but they can’t do them at the same time. In either case, students often need the opportunity to focus their attention on a single or just a few skills until they can integrate the skills within the larger set of skills. This isolation is what scaffolding provides.
For example, a child may be learning double digit multiplication. The child understands what multiplication is on a basic level, understands the algorithm for multiplying double digit numbers, and knows the notation for executing the algorithm. But the child just barely understands each of these issues. It takes all of her attention and focus to recall how any of them apply to a specific problem. So the child misses steps in the algorithm, writes numbers in the wrong column, etc. In this case, scaffolding might isolate any of these skills.
If we wanted to isolate the understanding of what is happening in the double digit multiplication the teacher might say “You’re not going to actually work this problem. I’m going to work the problem and as that happens you are going to tell me why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
If we wanted to isolate the algorithm, the teacher might say, “This time, I’m going to take the paper and I’ll follow the steps as you tell them to me, and I’ll explain why those steps work as we go along.”
If we wanted to isolate the notation the teacher might say. “I’m going to talk you through the problem, I just want you to write down what I’m saying in the right place.”
All of these leaves the student the necessary mental energy to focus on improving a single skill without becoming overwhelmed. This helps students progress through the skills necessary to a task until the student is prepared to integrate the skills fully and become fully independent in the task.
Learning to ask which skill a student or students need to focus on and which lessons and activities will help the student focus on that skill is a key teaching skill.
Low Floor High Ceiling
One of the perennial challenges in teaching is managing learning for multiple students, particularly when those students have different skill sets and levels of understanding within the subject. How does one keep students in the ZPD and offer appropriate scaffolding when different students are in such different places regarding the subject? Keeping a classroom, to the extent possible, low floor high ceiling is a great way to help a variety of students engaged in the ZPD all at the same time. What I mean by “low floor high ceiling” is that an activity can be done at many levels by many students all at once. To explain, chess may be the ultimate low floor high ceiling activity. Only people too young to understand how the pieces move can’t meaningfully play chess. And no human has yet gotten to the point where scaffolding is no longer meaningful in learning chess. The activity is deeply complex to do well and exceedingly simple to do at all.
On the other hand, solving a specific math problem is often the opposite with a much tighter window between what it takes to make a meaningful attempt and how much better you can become at the activity by continuing to solve it.
Filling a classroom with as many low floor high ceiling activities as possible while employing methods of scaffolding that provide support to students at many different levels enables a teacher to engage many students at the same time while keeping the class engaging, fun, and meaningful for the students.
Examples of low floor high ceiling activities include:
Discussion
Writing projects
Art projects
Simulations/Role Playing
Critiquing
etc.
Math often seems like it can present problems in giving students low floor high ceiling activities, but I thought this video was a fun example of a teacher exploring a low floor high ceiling math activity as well as a website with a number of suggestions for low floor high ceiling math activities.
When doing low floor high ceiling activities, providing scaffolding to students at various levels is also important. This might include:
Individual feedback
Rubrics
Well crafted critical thinking questions
Tiered activities which have students move on after completing different sections
Students working in similar skill groups
Students working in mixed skill groups
etc.
A good concept for teaching is that keeping kids in the ZPD keeps them learning, and low floor high ceiling activities keep them in the ZPD.
Widening the ZPD With Group Work
Another concept that opens up the number of students who can meaningfully engage in an activity is group work. This article by researchers working for the New York State Education Department explains the point well as it argues in favor of an expanded concept of the ZPD. The point made is that scaffolding in the ZPD is often conceptualized as an interaction between a student and a more capable other (usually a teacher but could be a peer), with all the benefits flowing from the more capable other to the student. However, the reality is that students can scaffold for each other in all sorts of interactions.
A less capable student can open up the ZPD for a more capable student. Maybe the more capable student felt competent with the task long ago, but suddenly discovers the opportunity to understand the task at a deeper level in explaining and giving feedback to the less capable student. Which means that not only does the ZPD open up for a larger range of students, but the students scaffolding each other frees up the teacher to interact with other students more directly.
At the same time peers of roughly equal capabilities can scaffold for each other. Vygotsky argued that learning is a social process and pointed out that students can often accomplish together what none of them would be capable of accomplishing alone. By leveraging individual strengths, dividing up tasks, and building off of each others’ work students scaffold each other and build competence for each other.
An example is an activity that I particularly enjoy using to help students grasp particularly difficult concepts (based on a philosophical reading for example). Students are put into teams of four and numbered one through four. I ask a difficult question and expect detailed answers and warn that there will be follow up questions. The group gets to discuss and try to come up with the best possible answer for five minutes, but only person number one can answer in this first round. By allowing students time to discuss they can build off of each other’s knowledge to craft an answer, and by stipulating that one particular student has to deliver the answer, the group has to work to ensure that that student is understanding the group’s answer.
Different variations of the activity add different wrinkles, but the overall goal is the same: get students to scaffold for each other so that the ZPD opens up for the group in a way that I can’t accomplish by myself.
In my last article, I noted that statistically class size ends up mattering less than one might expect in education. I would guess that much of that is explained by the fact that teachers understand how to get students of all sorts of levels to scaffold for each other.
Conclusion
In the end, the best teaching theories are the ones that work and that are easily actionable. The ZPD and scaffolding are one such set of ideas. It’s why they have had such staying power since first being proposed in the 1930s and why they’ve stuck with me over 15+ years of teaching. I hope they will offer you as much of a simple and effective framework for teaching that they’ve offered to me.