If you don’t know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
A learning experience is one of those things that says, “You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
— Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt)
Hope
I’m headed to Hope in a Volkswagon camper. My guts are churning with a nervousness that is six parts excitement, four parts fear, or maybe it’s the other way around. I look to the back of the van for the umpteenth time to be sure I have my trumpet, mutes, small percussion instruments, and the all-important microphone Alan— who I have yet to meet—has requested.
Hope, Alaska, population 165, sits southeast of Anchorage on the Kenai Peninsula, twenty miles as the raven flies but an hour and a half by road. It’s a gorgeous drive even if I can’t appreciate it at the moment. The skinny road to Hope is tucked against mountains on the left and hugs the silty shore of Turnagain Arm on the right. Further south it wends through forests of black spruce. The southernmost peaks of the Chugach mountain range rise up directly from the narrow inlet, a narrowness which causes one of the largest bore tides in the world. Bone-white beluga whales rise from the gray water like fat ghosts, feeding on squid and small fish. Surfers bob on their boards in the frigid water, waiting for the four-foot wave of the bore tide to take them on a ride that can last up to a mile if they manage to stay on the board. Goats on the cliffs above the road stare back at tourists. Much as I want to stop to watch all this, I can’t. I’m late.
As I drive, my mind flits like a kid without his Ritalin from surfing, to improvising music, to Baja Mexico, where I learned to do both. Baja was also where I made the random connection that put me where I am now, headed toward a gig in Hope with people I had never met, to play music I have never played and which I fear is beyond my ability to play well. This could be extremely, and publicly, embarrassing. What was I thinking?
The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)
Have you ever been around someone who is very funny and you become funnier when you’re around them? Or maybe you’ve played Scrabble with someone who pushed you toward more seven letter words, or played basketball with (or against) an opponent or team who brought out abilities beyond those you normally bring to the game. All of us can find examples of this increase of ability around certain people: teachers, friends, rivals, or in certain situations. It’s an experience that’s exciting, but which can also be taxing and stressful because you’re trying so hard to maintain that higher level. The space in which this common experience takes place has a name. It’s called the zone of proximal development.
The gig in Hope was my first truly challenging experience with the zone of proximal development, though I didn’t know it was called that at the time. Here’s how the guy who coined the term, psychologist Lev Vygotsky, defined the ZPD:
The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers. (Vygotsky, 1978)
Born in Russia in 1896, Lev Vygotsky became interested in things like childhood development, the psychology of play and art, cultural mediation and the internalization of learning. He was fascinated by the way we communicate, both verbally and culturally, internally with ourselves and externally with others, and how this communication gets adopted—and owned—by members of the culture. Though there are many fascinating Vygotskyian ideas to pursue, the zone of proximal development embodies several of them. Let’s take a closer look at it.
Some people, like me, have a good time picking apart definitions to figure out what makes them tick in order to understand them better. Let’s unpack and pick apart the defintion of the zone of proximal development.
The snippet that most needs explanation is problem solving. For me, this evokes images of sweating over a ratty math textbook while trying to figure out some needlessly tedious word problem. Although this certainly is a form of problem solving, Vygotsky’s use of the word means a whole bunch of other stuff, too. Insert the word performance, in place of problem-solving and you’ve got the essense of the concept. The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent performance and the level of potential development as determined through performance under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers.
Performance could be for an audience, so the problem to solve there is how to convey the music, dialogue, or information in the best manner possible; or performance could simply mean the completion of a task, say the mastery of a particular passage you are practicing alone in your room. Performance takes a particular ability level no matter what the task is. Alone, you’re able to complete the task up to a certain level. With help, you can perform the task at a higher level, but there is an upper limit to that, too. A diagram—known in ZPD terminology as a scaffold—will probably help you better understand at this point.
The Zone of Proximal Development
Too much abstraction can be confusing and annoying, so let’s use an example. Think about a small kid learning how to speak. That child is constantly in the ZPD because she’s often trying to communicate with adults who have vastly superior amounts of practice at communicating. She gets constant feedback (an important topic we’ll cover later), not only directly in the form of correction or prompting, but also in dozens of indirect ways, from being misunderstood, to facial expressions and body language of those she tries to communicate with. Imagine playing a video game against someone who is a lot better than you. If you watch what they do closely to pick up tricks and shortcuts, ask questions, take stock of your own shortcomings and make changes, you get better. In this kind of situation, you have to really dig in to keep up, and that’s what improving is all about. The ZPD is a demanding place to hang out, but it’s a great place to be if you seek improvement. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
So how can knowing about the ZPD help you? Being aware that something exists is the first step toward harnessing it for more efficient use, right? Think about a skill that you’re learning or would like to learn. Which situations would place you into the ZPD? What activities? Who are the people that would help you increase your ability while you’re with them? Are they available for you to study or hang out with? Are there any rivals who you think are slightly better than you who can pit yourself against, either directly or by remote comparison? If so, take full advantage of these resources, because they’re the best ways to improve your ability in any task. Once you’re in a situation, in the zone, there are certain things to be aware of that will push your understanding and your performance even higher. If your teacher and/or firends don’t understand how these concepts work, you can share them so that everyone is on the same page and you can all make more progress.
Inside the Zone
Okay. You’ve found yourself in the ZPD. What’s going on while this is happening? How can you maximize the experience so you can squeeze every last bit of juice out of it? There are a few things you can do that will help, and we’ll unpack all of them briefly here, then more in depth in the following posts. It’s important stuff.
Any time we’re involved in performing a skill with more competent others, we aren’t necessarily in the ZPD. Being in the ZPD implies a particular type of attention and an awareness of what’s happening, which includes motivation, short- and long-term goals, concepts of self and learning style, near-constant assessment and all the tools and tricks that are used to help you “get it.” And just because you’ve been in the ZPD doesn’t mean that information will stick. It takes time, thoughtful effort, and more time to internalize the learning you need to own a skill. It’s probably time for another diagram.
Inside the Zone of Proximal Development
Notice the bi-directional arrows in the diagram. These indicate that all of the pieces within the ZPD have an influence on all of the others and all of them are active at the same time. Remember that reality is a messy, interconnected miracle, and parsing it out like this is artificial, but it helps us to get our mind around what’s happening. When you think about this model, take some twenty-five-hundred-year-old advice from the Buddha (563-483 BCE), who said:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
Apply your own critical thinking to the model and use your own experience to test it and see if you can improve or change it to work better for you. Get actively involved with these ideas like this and you’ll be one step closer to making them your own, or as Vygotsky would say, internalizing them. In the next few blogs, we’ll unpack some of the ideas in this model.
Hope Revisited
I’m thankful the improvised music I tried to make in Hope at the Seaview Inn with Jazz Farm is lost to time. The experience was both fun, nerve-wracking, and occasionally embarrassing for all the reasons you might imagine, but the experience had a profound effect on me. I played a lot with Jazz Farm over the next year, including a couple festivals and a tour of Southeast Alaska that was a highlight of the summer, and I was in the Zone of Proximal Development every time we played.
The thing to remember about the Zone of Proximal Development is that you must try to put aside your pride and your fear and give yourself up to the learning experience. Jazz musicians call this learning on the bandstand. You can learn on the gig, and for thousands of jazz musicians, it was the only school they needed, and it worked. The best in any discipline know it’s about the craft, not the ego. So whether you’re in a real live situation, or are practicing with a teacher, or more accomplished other, focus on the discipline, not on how self-conscious you’ll probably feel. Make it about the music, not you, and improvement will happen a lot faster.
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references:
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in Society: Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Harvard University Press.
Filed under: Diagrams, Research Articles, Zone of Proximal Development
you are good i need more websites of trumpets
thanks. Which sites have you looked at already?