Vygotsky for Educators: Understand Adolescents and Make a Difference!

Adolescence is a transitional period between childhood and adulthood. It starts with the beginning of puberty (the process of sexual maturation) and ends when adolescents gain adult status (that is, start enjoying the major privileges and responsibilities of adulthood). In modern industrialized societies, this period covers the ages from approximately 11 or 12 years until 20 or 21 years. Just like the view of any other developmental period, the view of adolescence is greatly determined by a researcher’s theoretical perspective. Piagetians associate adolescence with the development of formal-logical thought, that is, the ability to reason at the theoretical level. Freudians associate adolescence with the development of new desires that make sexual intercourse the major motive of adolescent behavior. For Erikson and his followers, the major characteristic of this period is a search for personal identity, that is, self-understanding that will provide an answer to the most important question adolescents are concerned with: “Who am I?” As for parents and teachers, their characterization of this period often reflects the major point of their concern: drastic changes in adolescents’ mood state, behavior, and relationships with parents; the phenomena that seem to give a rational for calling adolescence “the period of storm and stress.”