- How do people learn in social contexts?
- How can teachers develop communities of learning?
- Assisted performance and the "zone
of proximal development" – Teachers will
understand how they can identify students' levels of proficiency
and readiness for a given task and target assistance accordingly.
- Strategies for fostering communication
– Teachers will understand the importance
of language, communication, and interaction in learning.
Teachers will consider several specific teaching strategies
to foster and guide communication in the classroom, including
the role of questioning, group work, managed discourse,
and reciprocal teaching.
- Social contexts and learning communities
– Teachers will recognize that when students work
collaboratively to assist one another and take on expert
roles, their learning is strengthened, reinforced, and refined.
Teachers will consider strategies they can use to build
- Learning takes place through our interactions
and communication with others.
- These ideas are based heavily on the work
of Russian teacher and psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, whose
theory of learning has been developed and put into practice
in schools by many other teachers and researchers.
- While Piaget focused on the individual child's
progress through biologically determined learning stages,
Vygotsky called attention to the ways in which social environments
influence this learning process.
- Vygotsky proposed the idea that learning
and development take place in the interactions children
have with peers as well as with teachers and other adults.
- Teachers can build on the ways children learn
from each other by creating a learning environment where
there are ample opportunities for student-to-student discussion,
collaboration, and feedback.
Vygotsky's Theories of Learning
- Vygotsky suggested that knowledge is constructed
in the midst of our interactions with others and is shaped
by the skills and abilities valued in a particular culture.
- He argued that language is the main tool
that promotes thinking, develops reasoning, and supports
cultural activities like reading and writing.
- The teacher or a more expert peer is essential
to this learning process.
- Individual development takes place in the
context of activities modeled or assisted by this more skilled
- Contemporary theorists have built on Vygotsky's
ideas about learning as a social process and suggested some
implications for teaching in the larger context of schools.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz
offer the following five principles for effective pedagogy,
based on a Vygotskian perspective and emerging from extensive
classroom research. Their work suggests the importance of
- having teachers and students produce work
- developing language and literacy across
- making meaning: connecting school to students'
- teaching complex thinking
- teaching through guided conversation (Dalton,
1998, cited in Tharp, Estrada, Dalton, & Yamauchi,
2000, p. 20)
Strategies for Fostering Productive
Interaction in the Classroom
kinds of interactions can assist the learning process. Two
ways that teachers can guide and enrich interaction with and
among their students are –
- managing student discussions
- assisted performance and scaffolding
Developing Learning Communities
- Vygotsky's theory about how individuals learn
from each other is often used to explain the benefits of
learning in groups.
- His ideas about how we learn have led to the development
of "learning communities" centered around student-to-student
interactions and the exchange of ideas.
- In a learning community, students learn through
carefully structured collaboration as they participate in
a shared practice or a group project in a setting that resembles
a real-life situation. Learning is always "situated"
in a social context because what
is learned cannot be separated from how it is learned and used.
Community of Learners Classrooms
- Work is carried out through a division of
labor and through repeated cycles of work – students
first research a topic, in order to share their expertise with their classmates and finally
consequential task requiring that all students have mastered
the content generated by each group.
- In a community of learners, expertise is
"distributed." Each individual contributes to
his research group and each group contributes a part to
the whole, based upon their knowledge about a specific topic.
- In learning communities, peers help one another
to build knowledge and skills. The teacher is not the only
expert or source of assistance.
Teacher and Student Roles in the
- The development of such a classroom learning
community is multifaceted. Teachers are charged with –
One of the more common misconceptions about
the teacher's role in a socially interactive classroom is
that the teacher backs away, stands off to the side, and
lets students discover for themselves in an almost unplanned
On the contrary, such classrooms are carefully
constructed ecosystems in which teachers are very much involved
in shaping the learning environment.
The learner also takes on more responsibility
– as a teacher of her peers, an emerging expert, a
group member, and an individual responsible for her own
learning and interests.
- creating and designing a learning environment
that maximizes students' opportunities to interact with
each other and other experts
- acting as an expert, model, guide, and
facilitator of these social interactions.
Collaborative Learning and Group
- Supporting learning as a social process does
not require that every classroom focus solely on long-term
- Daily tasks that foster more student-to-student
collaboration can build on the range of strengths and abilities
that exist in a given class.
- Many research studies have demonstrated that
students in cooperative learning groups perform significantly
better than those in competitive or individualistic situations
in terms of their reasoning, the generation of new ideas
and solutions, and how well they transfer what they learn
from one situation to another, as well as on traditional
- The teacher plays a significant role in helping
students learn to work effectively with one another; these
are not skills that develop without assistance.
- Another way to encourage students to depend
on one another and to be responsible for group behavior
is to have them practice these skills during short exercises
and games that require collaboration.
- Another way to facilitate group work is to
assign specific roles to group members that are related
to how the work is to be done so there is a clear division
- Effective group tasks require students to
draw on their individual strengths.
- David Johnson and Roger Johnson suggest four
characteristics of truly cooperative groups:
- Members see their work as interdependent
in terms of the task, roles, and resources ("we"
instead of "me").
- Each member is personally and individually
accountable to do his or her fair share of the work. (We
are assessed individually and as a group).
- Members use interpersonal and small group
skills needed for successful cooperative efforts.
- Members reflect and process as a group
how effectively the group is working together (Johnson
& Johnson, 1999, p. 89).
- Reciprocal teaching (RT) is a method of group
instruction that enables the teacher to fade from a central
role and builds in a structure for students to teach their
- RT is a term used both because it embodies
the generic idea that students can learn by taking responsibility
for acquiring knowledge and teaching it to others and because
it is a specific strategy for teaching reading comprehension.
- The lens of learning in a social context
helps us to think about how, through engagement in purposeful
tasks, with expert assistance, and by collaboration with
others, the learner is encouraged to operate "as though
he were a head taller than himself" (Vygotsky, 1978,
Back to the top
Return to Support
Materials for Session 7