Key Theories of Play/ 1st Assignment Experience

My Reflection through Diverse Theories and Lenses on Play 

Our session, as usual, began with the reading ritual for 25 minutes. Repetition of this activity every session has provided me with a reminder that reading is an essential step to develop my language, critical thinking skills and emotional understanding to become an integral part of literature reading. This reading activity was followed by an activation game that energized us for theoretical work. I found that the station-based approach using readings, podcasts and videos was highly effective for exploring classical, modern and postmodern theories. This activity helped to broaden my understanding on this different theories by interacting with my friends and learning about it more through discovery learning and interaction. This indirectly helped me realize Vygotsky emphasized social scaffolding, Piaget's focus on cognitive growth and Parten's stages of social play are equally vital for understanding a child's development. 

I also learned that no single theory explains everything, but they serve as a conceptual lens to help teachers understand their students more clearly. 

Way Forward for my future Teaching 

In my future teaching, I will move away from drill and kill methods and apply these diverse theories to create a safe and inclusive classroom for the students. I plan to incorporate Montessori's idea of purposeful play with Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory by using locally available materials that reflect my students' social-cultural context. By facilitating both individual exploration and social collaboration, I aspire to bring holistic development to all my students. 

Pictures from the research done with friends, which were shared with the class

1st Assignment Experience and Learnings 

The first assignment was clearly a wonderful learning experience with my two other friends. I got an opportunity to delve deeper into Lev Vygotsky's theory of socio-cultural learning, especially through the lens of the zone of proximal development. Through this assignment and as a member of Team Vygotsky, doing my research, I felt a strong responsibility to understand and represent socio-cultural theory in play. I learned that Vygotsky viewed play as a vital social process where the magic happens through interaction with others. The AH-HA moment for me was the concept of ZPD and MKO, as I realized that play serves as a primary tool for children to reach their potential by allowing them to practice skills just beyond their current level of understanding. 

Challenges Faced and Solutions

Despite the pros of working as a team and having a fruitful success of the assignment, some challenges we faced were:

Memorization and talking in front of the camera were tough for us as most of us are not used to following this way of learning and presenting our work. We tackled this issue by reducing our dialogues and keeping the main points in mind to present the ideas clearly and confidently in our video presentation.

Balancing individual assessment was yet another challenge we faced, as according to the gameshow criteria, there were individual marks for presentation and having to be in the in-character performance position was tough for us. Having to demonstrate scaffolding and the ZPD clearly and persuasively was hard for us, but we tackled this obstacle by correctly allocating our time properly and distributing the dialogues equally based on competency and doing more research and surfing online for more resources to clearly explain the concept of ZPD and scaffolding accurately. 

Way Forward in my Teaching 

In my future teaching, I intend to apply this knowledge by acting as a facilitator who will provide intentional and supportive scaffolding during play. Instead of dictating every step, I will observe my students to design learning provocations that challenge them appropriately. Using activities like acting out Bhutanese folktales or engaging my students in traditional lozey recitation, I will situate the play within their own culture and provide the right support to build my students' identities and social belonging while mastering complex concepts in learning. Therefore, this session taught me the highest levels of abstract thinking and self-regulation in preschool development are established in pretend play using object substitutions (Lev S. Vygotsky,1896–1934). 

Referred research article

YouTube video used as a reference

A picture evidence from our assignment explaining Vygotsky's theory in play