Can't Find My Camera...

I seem to have misplaced my camera so I'm going to talk about Sociocultural through text! Right then.

Sociocultural has a couple tenets that is very unique to only sociocultural theory:

• Adults use formal and informal interaction to show students how their culture interprets and responds to the world.
• Complex mental processes begin as social activities which then is later used independently.
• Children can perform more challenging tasks with assistance.

The first bullet is key because as the theory's name suggests, the theory takes into account the student's cultural background and the student will learn through that culture.

Now, before I go on, there is something about culture that I need to explain. There are two ways to look at culture: ethnic culture and the culture of an environment. For example, I have my Korean culture and the culture that is in my house when I was a kid such as being polite to elders, taking off shoes at the door and always doing homework. Someone could argue that the "house culture" can be seen as inherent in my Korean background, but the same could be applied to the culture of a classroom. You can always have students line up at the door, be courteous to others, etc. In that sense adults use formal (teaching) and informal (modeling) to convey what the culture in a particular setting is like and how the world responds by continuing to have those interactions with other adults or students.

The second bullet is something that promotes the idea of play with other students/peers or by themselves. A great example of this is when little kids play house. By playing with dolls and assigning each doll a role, the child is exhibiting the roles of the adults in the house and further defining it in their own way. When the child has the "father" doll sit at the head of the table, they are showing the culture that he or she has observed and learned within her own household. So, through play, the child is able to define and manifest what he or she knows about the world through a social activity such as play. Think of it this way, if you saw your students (I think they were kids right?) playing outside and you see them trying to not fall off a cliff or saying something is steep, then you'd know that they understood your concepts through their play.

The last bullet about students being able to accomplish challenging tasks through assistance is this idea called "scaffolding." Essentially when a student doesn't understand a concept, you help them get to the answer by themselves. For example, (and this is a very simple example) let's say a student is having trouble figuring out how to do multiplication. A teacher would pull upon the student's prior knowledge and scaffold how to solve the problem. If in a math class a student is having trouble coming up with a soultion to a word problem, the teacher would ask specific leading questions to help the student come to the answer. The teacher isn't just giving hints on how to solve it, but must go through the proper steps on how to solve it without solving it for the student.

Lets say the problem is something like if there is a barrel of apples and they cost $2 per apple, how much would it be to buy two? the interaction would go something like this.

T: How much is one apple?
S: Two dollars.
T: So how much would two apples be?
S: I don't know.
T: Well, give me two dollars for the first apple. There, now you gave me two dollars but you forgot that you need to buy another one for your mom and you need to buy one more. How much would you give me for one more apple?
S: Two dollars.
T: Right. Now how many dollars did you give me all together.
S: Four.
T: Right!

You don't simply just say, "Do two times two." You help them understand why and how in a real-life situation how you'd solve the problem. Scaffolding is something that good teachers do inherently without know what they're doing. But for scaffolding to work well, the questions asked must have a purpose and be objective. It's difficult to do sometimes and this is only in an ideal situation. I had a student who was just too impatient when I tried to scaffold how to read/count rhythms last week and it was just frustrating.

Anyway! That's Sociocultural theory. I don't think I did too great of a job going over the thing thoroughly, but that's the jist of it. :)

I'll try to find my camera ASAP so I don't have to type out these long posts of text.

I love you and I get to see you in a week! How exciting!

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Oh! I almost forgot the most important aspect of Sociocultural theory: Zone of Proximal Development. It was thought up by a Russian guy named Lev Vygotsky who did a lot of work in children psychology. ZPD is essentially giving a student challenging enough work for them to grow cognitively, but not give them work that's impossible because they won't learn. On the flip side, if you give students too easy of a task, then they won't learn at all because, well, it's too easy. ZPD is a hard thing to do because you need to know your students really well enough to challenge them without getting them to feel like its impossible. Its why scaffolding is very important because if the task does seem impossible but you know they can do it (due to their prior knowledge of what they know) you can help them accomplish the "impossible" task!