Using Community Writing to Teach Within Students' ZDP

As anyone who has spent time in an elementary classroom can attest, the young students invariably represent a wide range of developmental levels. Despite this fact, it is centrally important that teachers engage individual students in lessons and activities that are appropriate for them. In Catching Readers Before They Fall, Pat Johnson and Katie Keier illustrate how community writing activities can involve an entire group of students while still focusing on each student's learning needs.

First, it is important to look at Lev Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). The central idea is that children learn most effectively when performing tasks for which they require some assistance to complete. These tasks are said to be within the child's ZPD. Tasks that the child can complete unaided and tasks that the child cannot complete even with assistance do not provide the same potential for learning as those within the child's ZPD.

As Johnson and Keier describe, a community writing activity allows for group participation in which the teacher can direct an individual student's involvement based on her knowledge of that student's developmental level. For example, one student may be asked to write a word that begins with the same letter as his first name as this task would be within his ZPD. Another student may be asked to write a word that the teacher knows she is more familiar with. In instances that involve the spelling of words that are beyond the ZPD of any of the students, the teacher can quickly write the word herself as a way to avoid slowing down the group's writing process. Throughout the activity, both the teacher and the individual students are modeling the writing process for the entire group.

Community writing provides a number of advantages both for teachers and students and could certainly be useful in any classroom.