Weekly Message from Head of School 2022/11/06-2022/11/12
Dear Keystone Community,
Did you see the lunar eclipse this week? It was stunningly beautiful to see the moon turn from white, to red and back to white as it moved across the night sky. What a gift for us as we enter the winter season (as signaled in my solar terms calendar made by Keystone students!).
This week let’s reflect on the educational concept of the “Zone of Proximal Development”. This is a concept coined by Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. The Zone of Proximal Development is the space between what a learner can do on their own and what they can do with the support of a teacher or competent peers.
The reason this concept is so important in education is that it reminds us that optimal learning requires a certain amount of difficulty. If things are too easy, students tend to disengage. Conversely, if they are too hard, students can fail to persist, and also not achieve.
Classroom teachers and schools are always striving to create personalized opportunities for students to push themselves to their learning limits (and sometimes beyond) to ensure optimal and most efficient learning. We call this rigor, or appropriate academic challenge. The work of teachers is to personalize and recognize, for each of their students, how to ensure that each child has the appropriate challenge at the appropriate moment.
The work of students is to endure the natural discomfort with being right at the edge of their “zpd”: in the right place to learn. While learning is accelerated in this zone, it does not always feel comfortable, and it rarely feels easy—that’s the definition of the ZPD. You know you are there when you think, “Gosh, can I do this?” So, the next time you find yourself or your friends wondering if you will make it through the work ahead, feel free to cheer each other up by saying: “Wow, how great! You must be in the zone of proximal development!”
I am sure most of the adults (and many of our students) reading this can relate to the truth that the deepest learning is not always easy or even pleasant. In life, we often learn the most from our big mistakes. Nelson Mandela famously said “I never lose. I either win or I learn”. He could have been talking about the ZPD. It is true that you have to be right at the edge of thinking you might fail, or not make it, to learn as much as possible.
Keeping a classroom of students in the “zpd” is a delicate dance and one that our teachers here at Keystone are experts at. Our program is challenging by any standards, and students build confidence and capacity by pushing themselves to the edge of what they can achieve.
For the adults, we are here to let the kids know that if they falter, we will be there to help pick them up and get on with it, and if they soar, we are here to celebrate with them. We are all so fortunate to be in this community that pushes us to win and learn in equal measure.
See you next week,
Emily
