Teaching to teach in children’s ZPD and learning about this process

Resum

The concept of ZPD is particularly heuristic when teaching future teachers, but is quite complex not only to understand but also to apply in everyday practice.  Our project aimed at describing the way our students develop their understanding of such a concept through a guiding process which constitutes an innovation in higher education. The participants had to present video sequences illustrating the way they thought to have taught or not in their pupils’s ZPD.  Their discourse was analyzed with Fenstenmarcher’ s method. Our results indicate that our guiding process contributed to students’ reflection process, which constitutes a first step toward the understanding of the concept of ZPD.