Kaitlyn Laprise

Vygotsky Teaching Learning Example

Vygotsky is most known for his beliefs about social constructivism as well as
his work with the Zone of Proximal Development. The ZPD can and should be
considered when deciding how to approach any new concept with students because
it requires that students feel like they have just enough tools and support from
peers or adults to be able to solve a problem, while still being challenged enough
that the problem will inspire new understanding. Once a student has solved one
problem, their ZPD expands so that they are now prepared to approach a more
challenging problem with support from an adult or their peers. To apply this idea to
an instrumental ensemble warm up, the teacher could begin the class by playing
various three-note examples on an instrument using scale degrees 1-5 in Bb major.
For the first few examples, the teacher plays their three notes, sings the first scale
degree for the students, and then asks the students to identify whether the melody
moves up or down and by step or by leap. Then, the students sing the three notes
on scale degrees as a class, and then play it on their instruments. As they become
successful with this, the teacher could just give the starting note for an example
they play, and the students have to think on their own about intervals and direction
before they sing it and play it as a class. Next, the teacher just plays the examples
and the students immediately echo by singing and then playing. Once the students
are comfortable with this idea, individual students can make up three-note
examples for the class to respond to in this way. In future classes, this warm up
exercise could easily expand to include more notes in each example, all of the notes
of the Bb scale, or even into new key signatures. This is an example of an expanding
ZPD as each step in the process progressively gives the students less and less help
for them to solve increasingly difficult problems. It also is an example of using
modeling to take advantage of students natural ability to imitate.
As the founding father of social constructivism, Vygotsky believed that all
learning takes place within a social context and that learning which is constructed in
the context of active engagement in group work increases meaningfulness to the
student. One example of a way to incorporate this type of work into an instrumental
setting is to break students up into groups of four and give all of the groups the
same four-part chorale to work on. Their assignment is to work together to create
their own expressive interpretation of the chorale based on text, harmony, or any
other reasoning they can come up with, but they must be able to explain their final
decisions. Once they have made their choices, they then work together to rehearse
their interpretation and then each group gets a chance to perform the chorale for
the class. As they are listening to each other perform, the students take notes about
what they heard, and then the teacher facilitates a class discussion about the
similarities and differences between all of the interpretations they created. Finally,
as a class, they choose their favorite elements of all of the different ideas to decide
on one interpretation that they all agree with, and perform the chorale together that
way. In this situation, the students were given a problem of how to play a chorale
expressively that they have to solve at first as part of a group of four students. They
make expressive decisions and give specific reasoning for their choices, and then
have a chance to listen to and reflect upon the decisions that other groups made

Kaitlyn Laprise
when presented with the same problem before working together as an entire class
to make informed choices about the way they believe the chorale should be
performed. This activity helps students be actively engaged, work together to solve
a problem, exercise their creativity, and reflect on other solutions to a problem. The
knowledge about expressive decisions that these students have constructed
through this activity will be more meaningful to them because of the social context
in which it was learned and they are more likely to be able to apply this knowledge
to future expressive decisions.