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UK

The Falmer Press, 4 John Street, London WC1N 2ET

USA

The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101, Bristol, PA 19007© B. Jaworski,
1994

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

First published in 1994 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

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Constructivism and the Classroom ( page 25)
Piaget and Vygotsky
In Vygotsky’s words, ‘Human learning presupposes a special social nature and a process by
which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them.’(1978, p. 88) Piaget
believed that learning resulted from a child’s actions related to her external world—in
Bruner’s words ‘the paradigm of a lone organism pitted against nature’ (1985, p. 25)—and
that teaching had no place in this mode. In fact, according to Wood, (1988, p. 83), Piagetians
would argue that ‘premature teaching serves only to inculcate empty procedures or learned
tricks’—instrumental understanding (Skemp, 1976).
Vygotsky writes: Our disagreement with Piaget centres on one point only, but an important
point. He assumes that development and instruction are entirely separate, incommensurate
processes, that the function of instruction is merely to introduce adult ways of thinking, which
conflict with the child’s own and eventually supplant them. Studying child’s thought apart
from the influence of instruction, as Piaget did, excludes a very important source of change
and bars the researcher from posing the question of the interaction of development and
instruction peculiar to each age level. Our own approach focuses on this interaction.
(Vygotsky, 1962, p. 116)
Vygotsky placed great emphasis on social and linguistic influences on learning, and in
particular on the role of the teacher in the educative process. He introduced a concept to
provide some measure of a learner’s development related to instruction offered. Known as
‘the zone of proximal development’ (ZPD), this is ‘an account of how the more competent
assist the young and the less competent to reach that higher ground from which to reflect
more abstractly about the nature of things’. (Bruner, 1985). In Vygotsky’s own words, the
ZPD is: 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,
p. 86)
Vygotsky implied that, with appropriate instruction, there may be potential for a child to reach
higher conceptual levels than she would be able to achieve naturally. Vygotsky went
further: Thus the notion of a zone of proximal development enables us to propound a new
formula, namely that the only ‘good learning’ is that which is in advance of development,
(ibid., p. 89)
Consequences for Teaching
These theoretical notions beg many questions about what such ‘good learning ‘involves, and
the nature of teaching which will foster it. Constructivism, even in its social form, says
nothing at all about teaching. However, many constructivists have claimed consequences
from a constructivist philosophy for the teaching of mathematics. For example, von
Glasersfeld suggests: In education and educational research, adopting a constructivist
perspective has noteworthy consequences:
1. There will be a radical separation between educational procedures that aim at
generating understanding (‘teaching’) and those that merely aim at the repetition
of behaviours (‘training’).
2. The researcher’s and to some extent also the educator’s interest will be focused on
what can be inferred to be going on inside the student’s head, rather than on overt
‘responses’.

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 3. The teacher will realise that knowledge cannot be transferred to the student by
linguistic communication but that language can be used as a tool in the process of
guiding the student’s construction.
4. The teacher will try to maintain the view that students are attempting to make
sense in their experiential world. Hence he or she will be interested in student’s
‘errors’ and indeed, in very instance where students deviate from the teacher’s
expected path because it is these deviations that throw light on how the students, at
that point in their development, are organising their experiential world.
5. This last point is crucial also for educational research and has led to the development
of the teaching experiment, an extension of Piaget’s clinical method, that aims not
only at inferring the student’s conceptual structures and operations but also at finding
ways and means of modifying them. (von Glasersfeld, 1987a)

Thus, in order to help a student, the teacher has to understand something of a student’s
conceptual structures, not just affect the student’s responsive behaviour. Von Glasersfeld’s
third point supports earlier remarks on communication, meaning and social construction. It
suggests that teachers can powerfully employ language to help student construal. Student
construal may be seen in terms of students actively making sense of what they encounter in
classroom interactions. Implicit in this is that the teacher is construing students’ construal.
‘Getting inside the student’s head’ involves the teacher in constructing a story about the
student’s conceptual level and ‘using language to guide students’ construction ‘involves
devising appropriate responses as a result of the story constructed.
The student, working on some mathematical task, talks with the teacher, and stimulated by
the teacher’s prompts and responses, reveals aspects of awareness which provide
clues about construal. The teacher, focusing on the student’s activity and responses, adapts
her own schematic representation of the student’s level of understanding, and thus infers the
student’s needs. This emphasizes the importance of the relationship between teacher and
learner.
The barrier to the teacher, trying to gain access to student construal, is formidable. The
teacher could be tempted to respond only to students’ behaviour without making an attempt
to go beyond. However, from a constructivist perspective, knowledge of students’
constructions is vital in devising appropriate teaching. Bauersfeld (1985) addresses this
teacher-student interface when he writes: Teacher and students act in relation to some
matter meant, usually a mathematical structure as embodied or modelled by concrete action
with physical means and signs. But neither the model, nor the teaching aids, nor the action,
nor the signs are the matter meant by the teacher. What he/she tries to teach cannot be
mapped, is not just visible, or readable, or otherwise easily decodable. There is access only
via the subject’s active internal construction mingled with these activities. This is the
beginning of a delicate process of negotiation about acceptance and rejection.
That is why the production of meaning is intimately and interactively related to the subjective
interpretation of both the subject’s own action as well as the teacher’s and the peers’
perceived actions in specific situations. (Bauersfeld, 1985) He goes on to recognize further
that, although a teacher and students may be working overtly on mathematical tasks,
nevertheless, ‘Whenever we learn, all the channels of human perception are involved: i.e.,
we learn with all senses,…He cites Dewey (1963) who wrote, ‘Perhaps the greatest of all
pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is
studying at the time (p. 48). Thus a student’s construal is of the total learning situation, which
includes aspects of environmental and interpersonal relations within the mathematics
classroom as well as the mathematics on which a lesson is focused. The teacher’s

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construction of a student’s mathematical understanding, no less than students’ constructions
of mathematics, needs supportive or constraining feedback.
This can be provided potently by students’ errors or apparent misconceptions, which can be
the basis for diagnosis by the teacher and subsequent modification of the teacher’s vision of
the student’s conception. The teaching experiment, to which von Glasersfeld refers above, is
a research device based on Piaget’s clinical method, developed by Steffe (e.g., 1977)
and explored by Cobb and Steffe (e.g., 1983). It involves an interviewer in interacting with a
child by talking with her, setting tasks and analysing the outcome of the tasks in a cyclical
fashion, which allows the interviewer to build a picture of the child’s construal. It is thus a
device designed as a consequence of the four earlier observations, and one which is an
important tool for the teacher in learning of students ‘constructions.

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