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Development Statement
Having a sense of child development is at the center of creating an effective
educational experience for my students. This artifact shows a classroom socio-
dramatic play center that allowed me insight to each student’s level of emerging
literacy. In this 1st and 2nd grade combined classroom, we did a survey. It was up to
the students to pick their own question to ask and how to sort the answers they
received.
Lev Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development guide the way I
assess student ability and knowledge by giving a template of different levels of
thinking. It is then up to the educator to decide how this knowledge applies to the
future lessons for any particular child. (Gredler, 2012, p.128) Some students were
using symbols for different words, while others were attempting to spell the
answers. This was not my classroom and I did not know the ability of the students I
was working with until this activity. The 40 minutes spent doing this survey was
extremely insightful to their writing and spelling abilities.
In the classroom I assessed for my socio-dramatic play center, there were
conflicting personalities and it seems that a few students were hindered from the
conflicts. A strong classroom community allows students to perform at their best
and be assessed in the most honest light. According to Morcom (2014), learning is a
social activity that needs strong pre-requisite social and communication skills. A
depth of learning cannot exist until we teach students how to respect and trust each
other. The freedom that comes from feeling safe socially and physically, allows
students to take risks and admit to lack of knowledge. Often as educators, we
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concentrate on the concrete levels of knowledge, but another major aspect of
development is creating a space for a child to flourish and feel safe when taking
risks. Engagement in peer collaboration is reported to be ineffective where there is
adversity that students do not know how to overcome. Teachers must be available
to guide both social hurdles and academic issues. This was true for my experience.
One girl in particular that was told she was “doing it wrong” did not overcome her
embarrassment in order to join the survey activity again. I did attempt to counselor
her so she could continue her work but the student was not open to my help and, at
the time, I was not yet capable of effectively handling such a situation. This was
early in my experiences in the classroom.
Just as educators need to teach students how to work as a community, we
also need to teach them to assess themselves. This is a slow process over an
extended amount of time that is well worth the investment. Beginning in preschool,
Regalla and Peker (2017) noted the value of using dynamic assessment starting with
implicit assistance and moving to explicit assistance to target where the breakdown
in knowledge is occurring. Is it a simple mistake or a problem at the conceptual
level? This guides future instruction to either foundational skills or further practice
using skills that need more time to become firm in the learner’s experience. I gained
the most insight during my play center by speaking to the students and letting them
explain to me their systems for recording information or why they chose certain
symbols in place of spelling out words. Sometimes a symbol was for efficiency and
other times it was how this student wrote.
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As students grow and experience assessments that help them move forward
academically and within their learning community, they can slowly take on self-
assessments with explicit teaching and modeling (Poehner, 2012, p. 620). It is
important that we do our best to see ourselves honestly so we can overcome
hurdles that may otherwise hold us back from realizing our best abilities. Going
back to the example of using symbols for words, students could assess if the need to
be efficient is necessary in the given task. Or they can remind themselves that most
words have many sounds and push themselves to record more sounds from the
word they are writing. Regarding social skills, educators can explicitly teach
students to look for visual or verbal cues that someone is not comfortable and some
ideas about what to do when this happens. On the flip side, students can also be
taught how to self-regulate when they feel overwhelmed by their feelings so it does
not keep them from performing their best at whatever they want to do.
As educators we are not just teaching academic skills. We also need to teach
and support social skills. Academic and social skills are both needed for healthy
classroom environments and preparing students for life outside of the school
building.
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References
Armstrong, C. (2015). In the zone: Vygotskian-inspired pedagogy for sustainability. Journal
of Classroom Interaction, 50(2), 133-144. Retrieved from
[Link]
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Gredler, M. E. (2012). Understanding Vygotsky for the classroom: Is it too late? Educational
Psychology Review, 24(1), 113-131. doi:10.1007/s10648-011-9183-6
Morcom, V. (2014). Scaffolding social and emotional learning in an elementary classroom
community: A sociocultural perspective. International Journal of Educational Research,
67, 18-29. doi:10.1016/[Link].2014.04.002
Poehner, M. E. (2012). The zone of proximal development and the genesis of self-
assessment. The Modern Language Journal, 96(4), 610-622. doi:10.1111/j.1540-
4781.2012.01393.x
Regalla, M., & Peker, H. (2017). Prompting all students to learn: Examining dynamic
assessment of special needs and typical students in a prekindergarten inclusive French
program. Foreign Language Annals, 50(2), 323-338. doi:10.1111/flan.12261