Development Through Dialogue
Again much like chapter 2 this chapter deals heavily with education and how learning gets done through the use of language. Mercer seems to focus on the child parent/adult relationship as a kind of apprentice and master mini community where the child observes and interacts sometimes interjecting new verbal behaviors to test ideas gleamed from past experiences. The idea of scaffolding in a learning environment can be seen in art in things like paint by numbers and coloring books but at a certain point becomes counter productive. Once a certain level of understanding is achieved the training wheels have to come off so to speak. This I think is where the intermental development zone comes into play. Pushing a student just beyond their comfort zone in terms of what they are capable of, too hard and the they may shut down and give up, too easy and they get nothing out of it. The later half of this chapter deals with group learning and teaching kids to use language to ask the right questions and work constructively together. This section seems to be problem based learning or something very close to it. The essence of which is teaching critical thinking skills through group based problems solving where the teacher does not simply lecture facts or give answers but prompts students with questions to get them to ask their own questions and start dialogues with each other to reach a solution. Teaching a student problem solving skills is the goal, the teacher is their to facilitate the development of these skill not just give answers. This is something I have become very interested in and feel has great potential in elementary education.
Right, the point being that you have to do more than just give kids problems to solve, you have to give them the tools (language skills) with which to solve it. If the kind of talk they engage in by default is disputational or cumulative, they'll have trouble solving the problem.
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