The silver bullet: ZPD!

Spend a few hours in the Ed Psych class I teach, you could easily get the misconception that Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development is the correct answer to everything. And you might, I'm afraid, almost be right. "Brush your teeth. Go to church. Zone of Proximal Development."

Today this came up in our discussion of the 2 sigma problem - what makes a difference in a tutoring environment? Maybe it's as basic as the inability for the teacher to simultaneously correctly ascertain the proper zone of proximal development for 30 students. Maybe a tutor, even a peer tutor, is effective because it's an adaptive, responsive human with the feedforward-feedback adaptive abilities to both evaluate your current level and present information at the level slightly above. Maybe a robot teacher (computer program) is ineffective because there's no way we can program in enough variables (constantly changing variables at that) to provide the necessary context for intelligent decisions that enable scaffolding.

But what about the web? Jared asks. Does the web enable us to scaffold ourselves?

For motivated students, yes, Jon says.

But I argue that the web is not an entity, not a robot teacher - the web is just a really easy way to get to other human beings. The web is a tool to enable scaffolding... but there has to be a human on the other side somewhere.

So what does this mean for us now? The discussion came back to our good old friend Mastery Learning. Mastery Learning! Which is only really possible when someone knows if you've really learned - if someone alive and responsive can go through those processes with you, they're providing that scaffolding feedback.

So is the ZPD our silver bullet? Is mastery learning our silver bullet? Are ZPD and mastery learning really kind of the same thing? Do I get any extra points for brushing my teeth and going to church? Interesting things to keep in mind...