Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory Lesson Plan

The focus of my lesson plan was on Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory. I chose to use this theory due to an article by Abdul Panhwar on Vygotsky’s theory and how a child’s intellectual development can be broken down into two stages. Stage one is that children learn through communicating and interacting with other people. Stage two is that children are able to strengthen what they have learned by themselves after having help from peer collaboration (Panhwar, 2016, p. 183-184). Therefore, according to this article Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory emphasizes communication and helps students to acquire more knowledge from the interaction of peers, teachers, and parents.
Students are able to internalize the new information they are learning because they are collaborating, explaining, and are using critical thinking to help each other, and themselves, to understand new information (Panhwar, 2016, p. 184-186). I saw this during my lesson, I was able to introduce the topic of what they would be working on and then had students break up into partners. Students who understood the material were able to help their partner to also understand and I would go around and help groups who needed more …show more content…
A more knowledgeable other in a classroom may be a peer who has greater mastery on the material, a teacher, or even an author (Hodges, 2017, p. 141). By having students pair up with a more knowledgeable other, specifically another peer in my lesson, they are able to learn from a more experienced peer who can help answer their questions. This enables students to understand how to complete the task through a social and collaborative setting. Students are also able to imitate their more knowledgeable other, usually a teacher or a student in the classroom, and learn from them until they are able to go from imitating to understanding the information for themselves (Feryok, 2013, p.