Vygotsky’s Theories on Cognitive Development
In order to
get an understanding Vygotsky’s Theories, it is important to noteworthy some of
the main points of view according to the main principles of Vygotsky’s work; as
we can see in many documents that talk about the Vygotsky’s Theories, it can be deduce that He is the Champion of Social
Constructivism because He advocated the view that “children’s thinking and meaning-making
is socially constructed and emerges out of their social interactions with their
environment” (Kaufman, 2004, p. 304). According to this, it can be summarized the
main characteristics of Constructivism, as following:
- Constructivism: is hardly a new school of thought.
- Its emphasis in social interaction and the discovery.
- Vygotsky’s theories emphasizes on role of social interaction in the development of cognition.
- It is noteworthy that Vygotsky believed that the society or community plays a central role in the process of “Making meanings”.
- Two branches of constructivism: Cognitive (Vygotsky places more emphasis on the construction of our own representation of reality, the learner have to have the ability to discover and transform complex information if they wants to develop their thinking skills ) and Social (Also Vygotsky places more emphasis on culture and how the cognitive development varies across cultures, on the other hand, the social interaction and cooperative learning allow learner to constructing their own reality )
- Constructivist learning is congruent with how the brain learns, the constructivist education is the best way for leaners to learn.
- Children now days are not passive in knowledge, on the contrary they construct their own understanding of the world we live in, the teacher’s role is to have the ability to create and built an environmental that allows children to developing thinking skills.
This is an
informative video, shows what it looks like when teacher implement Vygotsky principles
in their teaching, it is a nice example to understand Vygotsky’s theory about Zone
of Proximal Development, look at it.
Vygotsky’s Theories
(Image made
by Sandra Cuadros)
