Okay, let’s compare learning to an elevator car in a very tall building.
Below us are all the floors our car has already passed—in other words, the things we’ve mastered, the things we have down cold, those things we no longer need help understanding or remembering. Once we know the definition of perambulation, or the square root of four, we know it. We could call this static knowledge; it is nailed down.
Above us, further up that elevator shaft, are all the things we might know someday. Even though we don’t yet understand nuclear fission or speak Bengali, we may learn them in the future; we have that potential. We may comprehend these topics someday, but for today they remain unlearned.
So in the car, where we currently stand, are the things we can process right now; this material is often close to, or related to, what we already know. This elevator car creates a learning space for building our new knowledge. It is a space between what we know independently and what we can potentially understand with the help of a more knowledgeable person, whether a teacher or a peer. This suggests that all humans need other people in the elevator car with them if they are to learn to their potential. We need to interact with these helpers, asking, listening and co-creating new understandings. This reminds us that learning has a very important social component.
This elevator car of learning sometimes goes by another name. Lev Vygotsky called it the Zone of Proximal Development. However, when we call it a zone, it sounds static and immovable, even though it is not. The ZPD is a moving target; as new things are learned, the elevator car moves upward, presumably for every day of our lives.
So, if learning is an elevator car, what are the implications for us—both as students and teachers. And how will the social component of learning be provided?
First, what is learned in that elevator car, that Zone of Proximal Development, is dynamic. As we interact with people to learn new material, at first our comprehension is slippery. We feel like we understand as we hear explanations, yet explaining what we just heard is hard and applying it even harder. That’s because as we learn, there is movement—we are coming closer to a full understanding—to moving up a floor—but it rarely happens instantly. This explains why a teacher can teach a concept on Tuesday and see confused faces again on Wednesday.
For our students, this means we need to provide times for interaction, discussion, brainstorming and verifying with other learners. It means that “Eyes forward, no talking!” must be tempered with chances to pair and share, talk in a group, ask questions and check answers with tablemates.
Just as important, it means teachers too must have peer interaction. Nobody is likely to learn everything by working solo. If there is no one in our elevator car that we can talk to, then all our blind spots, gaps in understanding and confusion will remain pretty much unchanged. No one is to blame; this is simply a reality. It connects to the adage, “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll keep getting what we got.”
Educators would be very wise to push the “Open Door” button on the control panel of our elevator car, and invite others to share the ride, discuss the situation, suggest some options and give us some feedback. It may be the only way we’ll ever get that elevator car all the way to the penthouse suite.
