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Re: [xmca] Might we pause to consider? Imitation and the Zoped



I am teaching a little Gr 2 girl math.  Here is South Africa, they teach
children to count up (e.g. 3,6,9,12,15 etc. and then when they have to learn
their times tables, there is the extra burden of saying "one times three is
three, two threes are 6" etc. I help Kalista, by taking the load off and
saying the "times" part and she inserts the answers, and then gradually
transfer the saying the "times" part to her. Then she has to automate this.
I believe I might be working in her ZPD, helping and gradually transferring
the responsibility to her.
Carol
PS Teachers don't do this--they just send the times tables home for
homework, for parents to teach and listen to.
PPS I love that story "I know the tune, but I still have to learn the
words..." Hugh Hawes puts it in his 1979 book.
Carol
On 28 December 2010 06:13, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi David, Andy and Peter -- I have been in airports and other family homes
> for a while which makes time to participate in the conversation for a
> while.
> I was wondering if you might find it interesting to pause a bit and expand
> on the issue of the inter-relationship between imitation and the zoped.
> Here
> is why.
>
> First of all, each of these terms is used in a variety of ways in academic
> discourse, and I am not always clear what people are gesturing at when
> they use either term. I think it would be helpful to figure out if
> different
> senses of  "imitation" are in any way related to different understandings
> of
> the term "zone of proximal development."
>
> Here is another example to add to David's language learning one. It
> involves
> learning arithmetic in a Liberian rural school in the 1960's. It is
> published somewhere in an early report of our work on mathematics learning
> acurately, but this is what I recall.
>
> Observing in the schools, my colleague, John Gay, heard the children
> intoning their times tables (think here of the intonation, as in David's
> example, la da da da da ; la da da da da,,,,,,,,,,,, The children speak
> little or no English, and Liberian English is, to American ears, rather
> sing
> songy. John asked a child what he was doing. "Singing, was the answer. I
> know the tune I do not know the words." These same children, when I helped
> them with their homework, would complain that the teacher was unfair. He
> gave examples like 2+2=4 and 3+6=9 but on the test he put 5+3=? and 6+4=?
> How are we supposed to know that if he didn't teach it to us." We would
> ordinarily refer to this as "rote" learning.
>
> In the context of this discussion, it might be thought of as forms of
> imitation in instruction.
>
> My hope would be that by pausing to dig more deeply into this combination
> of
> concepts, we might learn a lot about where we are slip sliding around
> without even noticing it.
>
> mike
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