Lev Vygotsky and the Zone of Proximal Development – the summary

This text is about Lev Vygotsky and his theory about the Zone of Proximal Development. At this
time, his theory was innovative because he believed that children need to acquire knowledge
before they can develop. He centered his thoughts on teaching methods and scaffolding,
asserting that teaching in the classroom should adjust according to the child’s age and cognitive
development. Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development becomes a fertile environment for
learning and advancement when students receive support from both peers and adults. The idea of
the ZDP is employed in psychology and education to denote the space where students are
actively in the process of learning and lies between what a student has already achieved and what
remains to be accomplished. According to this theory, optimal support for learning comes from
MKO, which stands for a more knowledgeable other, which could be a peer or someone who has
acquired and mastered the task. In our classrooms, we as teachers should make pairs of students
with different levels of knowledge so that, through pair-share, they can help each other with their
tasks and reach the Zone of Proximal Development.

The ZDP encompasses two levels: actual development and potential development. Actual
development is the domain where a student has demonstrated their capability to accomplish a
particular task. Potential development is the phase when a student has not yet fully mastered a
particular task but has the capacity to do it with appropriate support.