The Zone of Proximal Development (ZDP) in school education: experiences of Didactic and evaluation innovation

In this brief contribution, I will dwell on some initiatives the Italian school recently adopted, such as the Vygotskyan approach to implementing more constructivist and formative working methods. By constructivist working methods, we mean here those proposals that primarily involve the change in the use of school spaces and environments to be managed differently from the school tradition, focusing on greater sharing of the school building in the sense of a learning environment. We will, therefore, detail a project from the initial adoption in a couple of upper secondary schools that have developed throughout Italy, to date, in more than several educational institutions: The DADA project: Didactics for Learning Environments. The second point of attention concerns the change of evaluation perspective that has been experimented with in the primary education cycle for two years. From the logic of the mark, we have moved on to a descriptive evaluation. Therefore, the perspective of a summative evaluation leaves room for a formative nature. Once again, the traditional school dimension that saw assessment as the final moment of transmissive teaching has vigorously implemented the identity of a dialogic and dynamic assessment that supports learning through feedback and support actions (see scaffolding and J. Bruner).