Johnny The Apostle School Case Study

St. James the Apostle School is a small Catholic school in Carmel New York. The school serves approximately two hundred students from Pre-Kindergarten to Eighth grade. The student body is predominately white, however there is some diversity that exists. Johnny is a student in Mrs. Smith’s third grade class. Johnny was the perfect student to observe social, cognitive, and emotional development. Throughout the day, Johnny’s behavior exemplified different levels of development in each of these areas and it was very interesting to observe. Several times throughout the day Mrs. Smith allowed the students to read independently. Most of the students picked books with a lot of pictures and large print. Johnny, however, was drawn to a book

The WWII book fell in Johnny’s zone of proximal development because he could not read it completely by himself, but with the help of the teacher he was able to fully understand the main concepts of the book. The role of the teacher in this scenario is to provide the student with support in the beginning, and then gradually less and less so that eventually the student can learn to complete a task on his or her own. This process is known as scaffolding. Given time and proper support, Johnny should be able to complete WWII book on his own. Another important thing to consider when discussing Johnny’s cognitive development is the fact that his dad is a chemistry professor. Vygotsky’s theories rely heavily on social interaction as a force that drives cognitive development. Since Johnny spends a lot of time with his dad, it is possible that he has learned a lot of advanced language from him, which allows him to understand the things he was reading in his WWII

However in the afternoon things began to change. First, when Johnny shared his letter for the Pope with the class, and all the students laughed and teased him for praying for “his family that helped dig the Erie Canal”. Johnny went from being really excited to share to being really disappointed and embarrassed. He tried defending his answer, but the more they laughed the more upset he got, so he ended up slumped over in his seat with his head in his hands. Then, at the end of the day the teacher rewarded the class with a game of 7-up. At first Johnny was extremely excited that they were able to play the game. He jumped up and down in his seat and yelled, “YES!!!” 7-up is a game in which 7 students are chosen to stand in the front of the classroom, they are the “pickers”, while the rest of the class sits at their desks with their heads down, eyes closed and thumbs up. Then the pickers go around and chose one person each by pushing their thumbs down, once all the pickers have made their selection, the students that were chosen have to guess who they think pushed their thumb down. If they guess correctly they get to be a picker and the picker that chose them goes back to their seat, if they guess incorrectly the picker gets to stay in the front. At the beginning of the game Johnny was not selected by the teacher to be a picker so he sat at his seat waiting to be chosen. However, while the pickers were making their