FRJ #2 Vygotsky

FRJ 2: What evidence do you see of specific teacher behaviors that are geared toward Vygotsky’s theories? Cite specific examples and make clear connection to his work.


Ms. B partook in two of Vygotsky's theories while teaching her classes. The first and biggest one I saw her do was the Power of Play. Vygotsky stated that the role of play put yourself in psychological shoes of what you are learning about. He also states that pretend play allows the students to practice the roles or ideas they are learning about. Every day for all of her classes she structured the class so that she lectured, then did some type of application activity, and then would end with either a formal or informal assessment. Sometimes she would even use the application activity as her informal assessment. These application activities allowed her students to learn by actually having hands on experience (or play).

One application activity that stood out to me had to do with when they were studying the Expansion West in her U.S. Honors classes. She had her students divide into groups of three or four students and each student got a person from the West such as: Cowboy, Railroad Conductor, Sioux Indian Warrior, Sioux Indian Woman, Cattle Rancher, Farmer, and Miner. The students took butcher paper and traced the outline of their bodies onto the paper. They then did reading from their books and from outside reading material that Ms. B provided for them to learn about their person. They then drew their person into the body outline on their butcher paper. They were suppose to draw the types of clothing the person would wear, along with any types of objects or words that represent their person (i.e., the farmer would have the steel plow, a bag of seeds, the students could write the homestead act or 160 free acres of land). Then the students got together and presented their people to the rest of the class. Ms. B used this as her informal assessment of her students and the students really had a fun time drawing their person. It helped the students connect to the movement of Americans on to the Great Plains.

The second theory that I saw Ms. B use while teaching was the Role of Society or socio-cultural learning. Vygotsky believed that we learned through our culture and that our culture affected the way we viewed life therefore affecting how we learn. At Timpview there is a pretty big cultural diversity within the school. They seem to have students of all nationalities. The white population is still the majority but the Asian population in the school is close to second. Ms. B did a great job of including the different cultures into her class. In her AP World class they were doing her Asia unit. It was great how she included her Asian students. While I was there I observed their Ancient China section of the unit. She would ask her Chinese students to pronounce certain names or have them give accounts of how it is in China. One day she even had two students that are second generation Chinese-American give a presentation to all 4 of her AP world classes about the Chinese culture. They got to bring food and show a video of their cousin in a Dragon Race. It was great to get to see these students use their culture to learn.