The second week into tutoring at Mrs. Talbot’s eighth-grade algebra class, I saw the students moving on to a different (more abstract, says the Piagetian theorists from last week) piece of knowledge and skill, and a day of Mrs. Talbot’s absence from a concussion. Before elaborating on my observations on Mrs. Talbot, I will first comment on my own experience and observations on ZPD’s, scaffolding, and MKO’s in the classroom.

During my learning experience, I can vaguely recall many instances that I learned something because I was in my Zone of Proximal Development. It mostly involved a math or science teacher helping us review what we have learned so far in a unit or across several sections. Then, the teacher would invite us to solve a new problem, emphasizing that the skills or knowledge needed to solve the problem only involved what we had reviewed previously. After some hard thinking, I would miraculously find out that I knew how to solve a new problem based on what we already knew. I just needed to combine previous knowledge and skills in a new way, sometimes from a new perspective. I think this demonstrates that with the knowledge and skills previously learned, I have built up a knowledge base reaching close to the developmental level needed to solve the new problem. The way the teacher clearly showed us what we would need to solve the problem and asked guiding questions created the scaffolding we needed to cross our zone of proximal development to the next level of development.

An example of scaffolding I found in class was the grading process of tests. Mrs. Talbot explained to a tutor from St. Olaf and me that she grades differently for her classes at different levels. She has slightly higher standards for her AA classes and tends not to give half marks for partially correct answers. However, Mrs. Talbot gives half marks for her A classes (for which I was grading) for problems that students showed accurate work but got the final answer wrong. The image below is a side of the answer sheet she gave me.

Mrs. Talbot circles the acceptable answer for A classes, such as fractions that were not simplified. Mrs. Talbot explained that students in her A classes tend not to experience many successes in math, so she would emphasize more on the parts that the students learned and got right. This grading method seems to relate more to Erikson’s industry versus inferiority stage, where teachers should create an environment that encourages students to succeed and feel competent. However, I think it also embodies scaffolding and ZPD because Mrs. Talbot set levels of development based on students’ current developmental levels, and used different methods of grading tests to help students practice the skills reasonable to their levels. The only aspect of this example that departs from Vygotsky’s theory is that grading tests doesn’t involve the real-life interactions between a student and an MKO (the person grading the exam). Nevertheless, the expectations for grading the exam were similar to when we worked with students one-on-one, and we marked places of error in students’ work to convey our thoughts.

As for my role as MKO in in-person settings, I would often ask students questions when we worked one-on-one. For example, when a student explained how they got their answer but failed to realize that the correct operation should be multiplication, I would ask them to double-check which operation they should do, and what it means if two values are “touching each other.” I modeled problem-solving as an MKO by going over the steps of solving the problem with the student, directing them to the area they made a mistake, and hinting at a newly learned method.

After Mrs. Talbot returned from her absence, she was understandably tired because of the concussion and the students’ different needs. Therefore, when a student came to her on Thursday about the works he didn’t do because of his absence, she told him in exhaustion that she couldn’t remember exactly which days he was absent because she was teaching 150 students. It surprised me and reminded me of a discussion I had in our class on Tuesday. When discussing the implications of Vygotsky’s theories, I thought it was challenging to implement approaches that require individualized expectations and methods for each student, especially in schools with larger class sizes. My thought stemmed from my middle school, with class sizes of at least 35 students. When I visited one of my middle school teachers, she told me that it was exhausting when the school no longer put students into classes based on their ability. However, I wasn’t considering that the number of classes a teacher teaches may increase when a school has smaller class sizes. After all, teachers in my middle school usually only teach two classes each time. Therefore, the issue of individualized instructions relates to perhaps the absolute number of students a teacher has.