Vygotsky and education

Last spring, I finally purchased a copy of Vygotsky and Education, the 1990 collection edited by Luis Moll. It sat on my "to read" pile for six months... I finally started it over the weekend, and I am kicking myself for not reading it years ago!

The chapters are divided into three parts. The first deals with the social and historical aspects of his life-- very appropriate for the scholar who focused his work in education to the role of social interaction in learning. The second part deals with the educational implication for Vygotsky's ideas. The third with instructional applications.

Although the first few chapters are interesting, the first that should be required for all educators is chapter seven, "Teaching mind in society: Teaching, schooling, and literate discourse" by Rowland Gallimore and Roland Tharp.  They remind us what the zone of proximal development is and argue that teaching should be the work of improving performance. Improved performance is observed at the interface between everyday experience and scholarly learning; the recitation that we find typically in classrooms (and that is promoted in today's test-focused system) is not the performance we need to improve.

Much of the book is available on Google books, including most of the chapter that I say is first on the "must read."