Lev Vygotsky and Sheltered Instruction

The Russian thinker Lev Vygotsky made a model of how we learn. The brain has a schedule ,but we cannot just wait until everything happens as if watching a rose grow. Vygotsky intervened in that process. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) exists in all of us. We are not omniscient.

From Wikipedia we can get, "Omniscience is the capacity to know everything infinitely, or at least everything that can be known about a character's including thoughts, feelings, life and the universe, etc. In monotheism, this ability is typically attributed to God. This concept is included in the Qur'an, where God is called "Al-'aleem" on multiple occasions. This is the infinite form of the verb "alama" which means to learn."

The teacher has to know the ZPD of the student, and work from there on. This is the Goldilocks principle, not too cold, not too hot, just right. Children can be moody, if one looses their attention they go away.

English learners need sheltering as much as the students that Vygostsky worked with. One has to provide "scaffolding", so they can build their own egos from that basis. Defectology is the study and practice of handicapped students learning. In some non-pejorative sense one can say that an English learner student needs special attention.

English learner students are special.

There is a group of teachers involved in the development and application of the ways to address the needs of these special students.

One can read from their Website:

The Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2004) was developed to provide teachers with a well articulated, practical model of sheltered instruction. The SIOP Model is currently used in most of the 50 states and in hundreds of schools across the U.S. as well as in several other countries. The intent of the model is to facilitate high quality instruction for ELLs in content area teaching.