Vygotsky and Mission Statement One of the keys to a successful pedagogical experience is the ability to translate new materials into the minds of the learner. We have certainly come a long way from the days in which we thought every student should sit straight, learn the same way, and behave identically. One of the most important theories to arise in the 20th century was the idea of constructivism in education. This view is a theory that argues that humans generate and retain knowledge by way of experience. Social constructivism views each student as having unique and special needs, backgrounds, and modes of expression.

My Vision Statement -- The idea of positive and proactive constructivism encourages students to come to their own conclusions about knowledge based on their own worldview, past experience, and the nature of their instruction. The responsibility, however, of actual learning resides with the student -- the teacher is there as a guide, respondent, and cheerleader.

Research Premise - Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, for instance, believed that children learn best through...

He called this their Zone of Proximal Development, a continually evolving set of activities that are improved by teachers supporting the learning goals. For Vygotsky, supplying the child with a combination of theoretical and empirical learning methods is a more robust way to ensure cognition. This leads to something he called "leading activity," which, especially in middle childhood (e.g. elementary school), becomes an important formative step in the development of self-consciousness and a way to define the student's role within the world. This process continues to evolve as the learner masters more and more concepts -- guidance from the teacher, experience with the environment, then internalization of the knowledge and moving to a different experience while taking the previous experiences and putting them into their own library of past knowledge. Part of this formational process is learning to deal with disappointment and to understand that human emotions are fluid -- sometimes people are disingenuous, sometimes quite honest. It is a difficult task, though, to come…