Michael Zen

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

The result was a version of Vygotsky that was both accessible and unrecognisable. The Zone of Proximal Development (originally a metaphor describing the dialectical relation between instruction and development) was reinterpreted as a practical teaching method: a “scaffold,” a zone of peer support, a recipe for collaborative learning. In the process, a philosophical construct about the growth of consciousness became a pedagogical slogan.

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

Mind in Society appeared in 1978 at exactly the moment Western education needed an alternative to behaviourism. The social Vygotsky fitted the progressive mood perfectly and was institutionalised before the full body of his work arrived in the West.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@C_Hendrick He was a psychologist.

That is why understanding psychology is important in education.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@ThrillaRilla369 No. Teaching to be grateful and being polite can be done without them.

It should be innate and silent.

[Robert Pondiscio @rpondiscio]

What we now call "classical education" would have been called, until fairly recently, simply "education."

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

How to find a language arts tutor (for writing based on reading classical works) for a high school student?

Is in person or online better?

[Brian Tolentino M.Ed @TolentinoTeach]

Some teachers insist on keeping everything positive, even their language.

I don't.

When dealing with a difficult class, I turn their behavior into a vocabulary lesson. If they are going to disrupt my room, they are going to learn a new word for it. Here are some of my favorites:

•Obnoxious
•Unruly
•Defiant
•Discourteous
•Boisterous
•Rambunctious
•Contentious
•Combative

Example: “Your boisterous behavior is causing other students to lose their focus. I need you to stop.”

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@maneatingcow23 @educator4ever36 If you go to a theme park every day, does the excitement dull off?

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@maneatingcow23 @educator4ever36 Can it be the opposite? Because of the rooms like that, you have adhd.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@hmhawthorne @educator4ever36 @corey_blayne Teachers do it for themselves. There is no requirement that a teacher must spend own money to decorate the room. There should be visuals, yes. Related to learning.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@ToddVercoe @Fergalcious_ Good educators take Developmental Psychology into consideration. Massive cognitive overload, reduced imagination (no need to imagine, just find the visual), unnecessary items, no cohesion between colours, no space between visuals.

Adults can filter it. Young children cannot.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@TeachMeOntario @VinceBoley How do you teach recognizing pattern in those words? Which activities do you use with students when teaching spelling?

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@eduwithtina @pensandpoison @athenaeumbc Why?

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@literacypodcast Research how it was used for whole class literacy instruction when it was created by an educator with knowledge of psychology. Very interesting how he started and what it looked like.

Check the original works.

It was not a small group lesson.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

The fastest learner is the person with the shortest cycle time between attempt, feedback, and correction.

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

You cannot be creative at a high level unless you are robotic at a low level.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@MrDanielBuck How will you differentiate for a student who can't read and can't write?

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@BasedRedWolf Unfortunately, politics is term based.

[Michael Zen @ZebMic]

@Larryferlazzo People should give books, board games, and their time.

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In @chronicle:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”