Lev Vygotsky
 Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who believed
children learn through social interaction.
 Vygotsky’s work began when he was studying and learning
a development to improve his own teaching. His works
have become major influence in psychology and education.
 His theory, sociocultural theory, stresses children’s active
engagement with their environment. Vygotsky saw
cognitive growth as a collaborative process. Shared
activities help children internalize their society’s modes of
thinking and behaving and make those folkways their own.
He places special emphasis on language as an essential
means to learning and thinking about the world.
 Vygotsky suggested that a child’s private speech plays an
important role in the cognitive learning of a child by
moving the child toward the ability to plan, monitor, and
guide their own thinking by problem solving.
 Vygotsky believed that adults or older peers help direct and
organize a child’s learning before the child can master and
internalize what they are trying to learn. Guidance in
helping children is called a zone of proximal development
(ZPD), which is the gap between what they already able to
do, and what they are not quite ready to do by themselves.
With the right kind of guidance, Vygotsky believed a child
could perform any task successfully.
 Scaffolding is the temporary support that parents, teachers,
or others give a child in doing a task until the child can do
it alone. This support could be clues, reminders,
encouragement, breaking a problem down into steps,
providing an example, or anything else that allows the
student to grow in independence as a learner.
 Vygotsky died at the age of 38 before he had the time to
implicate his theories through teaching. Some of the
applications have been created by others. It is not known
whether Vygotsky would even agree with the applications
being presented.