An old blog that I ran while doing my PGCEi had several popular pages which contain my commentary on education research that I was reviewing at the time. I have decided to publish those pages, slightly edited to be less reflective of the specific course.
The first post is based on the following work:
Wood, D. (1986) Aspects of teaching and learning. In: Richards, M. and Light, P. (Eds.), Children of social worlds: development in a social context, pp. 191-212. Polity Press. UK.
Wood says: ‘If children are able and willing to be contingent upon the thought processes and actions of another, then learning may proceed. If they are not, then it seems unlikely that learning will follow’.
The quote comes from Wood (1986) discussing the difficulties of contingent teaching in practice. In contingent teaching, the teacher must be contingent upon the learner and not the learner upon some other party. In contingent teaching, the learner cannot manage teacher-learner interactions based on the learner’s knowledge of the teacher, as the quote implies, but by the teacher based on the learner’s knowledge and understanding, as far as it can be discovered. Nevertheless, Wood (1986) does mention the difficulties of applying contingent teaching and, perhaps, the quote is designed to bring out the difficulties in his theory.
Wood’s (1986) proposes that the teaching and learning process relies on teacher’s knowledge of learner’s thinking, but that much instruction taking place in classrooms depends on learner’s awareness of answers the teacher has and they must learn. Contrast that with interactions in the home, where a caregiver often tries to discover what the child is thinking before supporting with the task. Indeed, Wood (1986) notes evidence that 70% of parent-child interactions are initiated by the child.
Thus, in Wood’s (1986) view, teacher-learner interactions are vitally important for productive learning. The purpose of these interactions is to give the minimal possible help to the learner in completing the task and that they can allow the teacher to base instruction on the leaner’s current level of understanding. The minimal possible help will, per Wood (1986), maximise learning, or perhaps, to use Vygotskian terminology, extend the learner further into their zone of proximal development, or locate the area of actual development.
Moving onto the difficulties in Wood’s (1986) theory of contingent teaching, it may be impractical for his theory to be applied in a fully-correct manner because of the intensity of managing interactions to that detail. Perhaps Wood intends to make clear that contingent teaching is better applied, either in one-to-one instruction, or in small groups. Equally, it may be that teachers should be encouraged to attempt contingent teaching as possible in their circumstances.
Secondly, contingent teaching, while owing something to Vygotsky, also owes something to Piaget’s child-centred approach (the child learns by acting on their own environment and not by being acted upon). This approach, as the quote in the question seems to hint at, is difficult to plan for and difficult to construct a curriculum around.
Finally, the theory doesn’t look at methods of original instruction, although we might presume that a scaffolding approach would be proposed. Many of the experiments did not take some initial teaching as a basis for the research and so the original instruction was not considered. Supposing that a child could already complete the task independently there didn’t seem to be any discussion of how that had come about.
Bibliography:
Piaget, J. (1962) Comments on Vygotsky’s critical remarks concerning The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/comment/piaget.htm [accessed 30th April 2017]
Piaget, J. (1963) Stages and Their Properties in the Development of Thinking. Social Research. Volume30, pp. 283-299.
Vygotsky, L. (1934) Thought and Language [online]. Boston: MIT Press. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/index.htm [accessed 1st May 2017]
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986) Thought and Language [trans Kozulin, A.]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wood, D. (1986) Aspects of teaching and learning. In: Richards, M. and Light, P. (Eds.), Children of social worlds: development in a social context, pp. 191-212. Polity Press. UK.