Why Vygotsky [Still] Matters
An Interview with Elena Bodrova
and Deborah J. Leong

Elena Bodrova is cofounder and knowledge advisor at Tools of the Mind, an
educational nonprofit in Colorado. In collaboration with Deborah Leong,she created the Tools of the Mind early childhood curriculum and professional development program for teachers based on the theories of learning of Lev S. Vygotsky and his disciples. Her engagement with Vygotsky’s
work began at the Russian Institute for Preschool Education and continued
in the United States at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, where
she was a visiting professor, and at Mid-continent Research for Educationand Learning, where she served as a principal researcher. She has authoredmany articles and book chapters about early literacy, assessment, play, andself-regulation. Deborah J. Leong is cofounder and president of Tools of theMind and professor emerita of developmental and educational psychology at
Metropolitan State University. She has coauthored numerous articles, books,
and videos about play, the Vygotskian approach to education, self-regulationand executive functions developments in preschool and kindergarten, andassessment and measurement in the early childhood classroom. Key words:
child development; cultural-historical approach; early childhood education;
Lev S. Vygotsky; make-believe play; zone of proximal development

American Journal of Play: Tell us about where you grew up and how you played
as children.
Elena Bodrova: I grew up in Russia (at the time, it was the Soviet Union).
Until the age of thirteen, I lived with my parents in St. Peterburg (thenLeningrad), spending summers in Moscow with my grandparents. Ourfamily moved to Moscow when I was thirteen. I remember playing withother children outside (jumping rope, and all kinds of movement games).
We were all latchkey kids and spent hours playing after school until darkwhen it was time to go home and do our homework. During summer, weplayed fairly elaborate scenarios involving building and attacking fortresses,
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props (like cardboard dolls) to make them different outfits that went withthe scenarios we were enacting.
Deborah J. Leong: I grew up in rural California and lived in vineyards because
my father ran several wineries. I remember playing elaborate stories frombooks I had read with my two younger sisters and other children who lived
at the winery. We didn’t have any TV. We also played tag and all kinds ofphysical games at school. In fifth grade, we moved into town, and I playedwith children in the neighborhood for the first time. Like Elena, we would
stay out all day in the summer until it was dark. When I was eleven, we
moved to Barquisimeto, Venezuela, for a year. I remember the joy of finding out that my new friends enjoyed the same things that I did and that we
played together the same way. It was glorious.
AJP: How have these early play experiences influenced your approach to studying early childhood and play?
EB: I remember that, oftentimes, I was the oldest kid in our gang, so I ended up
directing my younger playmates. Probably, it is why I was always drawn
to young children and why I chose my career as a researcher of child psychology.
DL: I remember the immense joy and pleasure of playing with my friends andmy sisters and how it involved much discussion and preparation before weactually played what we planned to play. Playing together made hours passin what felt like a second, and I remember being very happy and laughing alot. I also remember playing stories and changing the outcomes by changing the way the characters acted and felt. I remember negotiating what wewould play. When we were playing games like tag, I remember discussing
the rules and how to make them fair. My experience playing made the ideas
about what children learn in play—the depth of development that occurs
there—really resonated with me. It had a profound effect on my views of
how learning happens in early childhood.
AJP: Who was Lev S. Vygotsky?
EB and DL: Lev Vygotsky was a psychologist and educator working in the 1920s
and 1930s postrevolutionary Russia. He can be considered a true Renaissance man for contributing to many areas of scholarship, including literary
criticism, special education, theoretical and applied psychology, neuropsychology, and linguistics. He lived a short but productive life, laying thefoundation for the work of several generations of his students and followers.

Why Vygotsky [Still] Matters

Shortly after his death in 1934, Vygotsky’s writing was suppressed by theSoviet regime for deviating from the official party line, eventually to berediscovered in the late 1950s to early 1960s.
		 To paraphrase what we wrote for the 2007 Early Childhood Education: An International Encyclopedia, Vygotsky was born in 1896 in a partof the Russian empire that is now the Republic of Belarus. He is often
called the “Mozart of Psychology” because, like the famous composer, heapplied his early genius to many different disciplines. And, like Mozart, hedied young—in Vygotsky’s case of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-seven.
Vygotsky had to overcome many obstacles during his remarkable life. To
attend Moscow University as a Jew, he had to win a special lottery despite
having graduated high school with honors. Only specific careers would
allow him to live outside the Pale, and he pursued a degree in medicine,
switching to law during his freshman year. Even attending law classes,
however, Vygotsky also studied the humanities, simultaneously enrolling inShanyavsky University for classes in philosophy, literature, and linguistics.
		 Vygotsky graduated from both universities and returned to his native
Gomel, where he taught literature, language, and psychology to schoolchildren, night school students, and teachers in preservice and in-service
programs. During this period, Vygotsky developed many of the innovative ideas that later formed his cultural-historical approach, and in 1924
he presented some of them at the All-Russian Congress on the Study ofBehavior in St. Petersburg. Although he was an unknown instructor froma small provincial city, his presentation made such an impression that he
was offered a prestigious research position at the Moscow Psychological
Institute.
		 Vygotsky then moved to Moscow in 1924 hoping to promote a newtheory for understanding and solving the social and educational problemsof his time. In addition to this theoretical work, Vygotsky pioneered newpractical applications of his ideas. One of these he called “defectology,” adiscipline that combined child abnormal psychology and special education.
In fact, he became the head of an experimental laboratory later known as
the Institute of Defectology. There, he advocated a new approach to educating children with special needs focused on giving them particular cultural
tools to help them integrate fully into society. Vygotsky immersed himself
in research, writing, and teaching in child development, educational andclinical psychology, special education, and the psychology of art, expanding

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the circle of his colleagues and students into what later became the Vygotsky
School. He did not, however, completely realize his hopes to create a newtheory during his lifetime nor were they realized during the lifetimes ofmost of his closest colleagues and students.
		 When the academic openness of the early years of the Bolshevik revolution ended, the USSR’s communist government suppressed Vygotsky’s
ideas and the educational practices he initiated. These ideas and practices reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s, kept alive by Vygotsky’s students,
who managed to preserve his scientific legacy, enriching the Vygotskian
approach to education and broadening its practical applications.
AJP: What were some of his key views on child development?
EB and DL: According to Vygotsky—as we suggested in our 2005 “High Quality
Preschool Programs: What Would Vygotsky Say?” —the history of humandevelopment is a complex interplay between the processes of natural development, determined biologically, and the processes of cultural development, brought about by the interaction of a growing individual with others.
Thus, the issue is not one of nature or nurture but of how nature andnurture work in concert. What happens as a result of these interactions
amounts to more than the simple acquisition of values, expectations, orcompetencies promoted by a specific culture. Instead, the entire system ofnaturally determined mental functions gets restructured to produce what
Vygotsky called higher mental functions.
		 When we discuss Vygotsky’s views on child development in early years
it is important to specify the meaning of the term “preschool” in his writings. In Vygotsky’s day, children started formal schooling at seven or eight,
so preschool covers what we now call kindergarten and first grade. During
this preschool period, in which the restructuring we just mentioned goes
through its initial stages, the use of cultural tools transforms children’s
perceptions and begins to transform some of their other cognitive processes
like attention, memory, and thinking. In addition to cognitive processes,
social and emotional capacities are similarly transformed. As these cognitive, social, and emotional capacities develop, preschool children make thetransition from being “slaves to their environment” to becoming “mastersof their own behavior.” Their behavior develops through self-regulatory,
private speech and through their participation in make-believe play, bothof which pave the way for higher mental functions.
		 Vygotsky’s idea of children becoming more intentional in regulating

Why Vygotsky [Still] Matterstheir behavior as they learn to use the “tools of the mind” of the culture
in which they are brought up resonates with current views about selfregulation and executive functions being critical to children’s cognitive,social, and emotional development. Moreover, working jointly with hiscolleague and thought partner Alexander Luria, Vygotsky laid the foundation for a developmental neuropsychology that predates current theories
of executive functioning by many decades.
AJP: Take us back to the early twentieth century. What were some of the viewsof other developmental theorists that Vygotsky was responding to?
EB and DL: Let’s read a quote from our 2024 Tools of the Mind: The Vygotskian
Approach to Early Childhood Education: “Among the major Western theorists that Vygotsky studied and reacted to were psychologists such as
Piaget (constructivism), Watson and Skinner (behaviorism), Freud (psychoanalysis), Koehler and Koffka (Gestalt psychology), as well as educators, anthropologists, and linguists. In his theoretical papers and empiricalstudies, Vygotsky proposed alternative explanations for several of Piaget’s
early works concerning the development of language in young children.
Vygotsky frequently referred to Koehler’s work on the use of tools by apes todiscuss various similarities and differences in animal and human behavior.”
		 Vygotsky also commented on the work of educator Maria Montessori(specifically, on her methods of teaching writing to young children), arguing that the activity children were engaging in in Montessori preschools
was calligraphy and not writing per se.
AJP: How did you first discover Vygotsky’s work? How has his research andwritings influenced your own work?
EB: I was fortunate to study with several of Vygotsky’s direct colleagues andstudents as a student at Moscow State University. The class on General Psychology was taught by Alexei Leont’ev; the class on Neuropsychology wastaught by Alexander Luria; and the classes on Child Psychology were taught
by Daniil Elkonin and Piotr Galperin. Later, the advisors for my undergraduate papers and later my master’s thesis and PhD dissertation weresecond-generation Vygotsky scholars, and after that, my older colleagues
in the Russian Institute for Preschool Education were third-generation
Vygotskians. So, it can be said that all my formative years as a student and as
a researcher were shaped by Vygotsky’s work and the work of his students.
DL: At Harvard in the 1980s, I studied with Courtney Cazden, who was an
early Vygotsky scholar, and she introduced me to the concept of the zone

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between the actual developmental level determined by individual problem solving and the level of development as determined through problem
solving under guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.” Thatreally resonated with me. The idea that there was an individual window ofopportunity for learning—and that we could provide teaching that matchedthat window—was really an exciting idea. However, I have to say I learned
to operationalize this idea—to identify the tactics teachers could use to support the ZPD—by working with Elena in the classroom. Elena brought a
depth of understanding about how actually to teach what we used to adapt
typical early childhood activities so they responded to the ZPD in a way
teachers could actually implement. I hope our work has helped teachers
use the wonderful ideas that Vygotsky and his students developed.
AJP: Why are Vygotsky’s writings on play important for us to consider andreconsider a century later?
EB and DL: We could list several reasons for the importance and timeliness of
Vygotsky’s writings on play. One of the most pragmatic involves the virtual
disappearance of make-believe play from the culture of childhood (andfrom the early childhood classrooms as well) and a possible link between
this disappearance and the alarming rise of mental health problems inchildren and young adults, as Peter Gray discussed in his important 2023
article in the Journal of Pediatrics about the decline in independent activity.
		 Another one concerns the apparent disconnect between the disappearance of child-directed, make-believe play and society’s emphasis on
so-called twenty-first–century skills, all of which require personal agency.
		 There is also a philosophical reason—Vygotsky and his students (mainly
Daniil Elkonin) view early childhood, along with its uniquely childhood
activities such as make-believe play, not merely as the time when children
are “getting ready” but as one having its own value independent from otheractivities society deems beneficial. It is in play that children develop general
underlying competencies affecting their ability to acquire the multiple toolsof the mind provided by their culture well beyond their primary school
years. The shortsighted emphasis on school readiness prevalent in Westerneducation systems ignores the inherent value of early childhood, which
results in poor outcomes across many areas of child development and learning including—ironically—school adjustment and academic achievement.
AJP: Why is make-believe play so important in early childhood classrooms?

Why Vygotsky [Still] Matters

EB and DL: Compared to all other activities (including all other kinds of playsuch as construction play and movement games), make-believe play provides the most benefits to child development. In Vygotsky’s words, “In play,a child is always above his average age, above his daily behavior; in play, it
is as though he were a head taller than himself.” This “head taller” applies
to multiple emergent skills and competencies and, above all, to a child’sdeveloping ability to self-regulate, which is the ability Vygotsky considered
the main developmental accomplishment of early childhood and a necessary prerequisite to a child’s success in school and beyond.
		 To translate Vygotsky’s words into today’s language, reintroducing
mature, make-believe play in early childhood classrooms may assist in
solving the dilemma of the long-term benefits of high-quality prekindergarten experiences in the face of an apparent PreK fadeout (based on themeasures of so-called “constrained” skills). Researchers have been long
puzzled by the fact that the advantages in cognitive and academic skills
for the children attending PreK appear to be short-lived and tend to fadeaway after several years of formal schooling. This fading seems to contradict the findings of several longitudinal studies demonstrating long-termand (as in Heckman’s recent studies) even intergenerational effects of PreKon a variety of real-life outcomes. One of the possible explanations forthis puzzle that has been suggested recently by some scholars holds thatshort-term outcomes of PreK get measured on “constrained” skills (i.e., thedirectly teachable skills that can be readily assessed). On the other hand,skills such as self-regulation—which might be responsible for children’s
success in school and in life past primary grades—belong to the category of“unconstrained,” and they are more difficult to assess and to teach directly.
Promoting mature, make-believe play in early childhood classrooms may
be a promising strategy to help children build their unconstrained skills.
AJP: What is the Tools of the Mind childhood curriculum?
EB and DL: As we wrote in 2019 in the Journal of Cognitive Education andPsychology, Tools of the Mind (often shortened to Tools) is an early childhood instructional program based on the principles of cultural-historical psychology. Although the American educational system had seen
Vygotskian-based curricula for older students, most previous attempts to
use such pedagogy with younger children had been limited to individual
instructional strategies, such as using “Elkonin boxes” to teach phonemic
awareness or using measurement to introduce the concept of number. In

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contrast, promoting isolated areas of child development, Tools applies acultural-historical approach consistently throughout an entire curriculum—from using specific activities and materials to organizing students’
daily classroom experiences to the using dynamic assessment for monitoring student progress.
		 Tools emphasizes the development of children’s self-regulation, which
Vygotskian scholars often call intentionality or deliberateness. In any case,it refers to a mental facility necessary for the development of higher mental
functions, and it constitutes a critical prerequisite for success in school.
In addition to Vygotskian educational philosophy, the Tools programapproach to promoting self-regulation is also informed by Alexander Luria’s
work on the genesis of voluntary actions and by more recent developments
in cognitive neuropsychology, particularly concerning self-regulation andexecutive functions.
		 In Tools classrooms, we give children multiple opportunities to practice self-regulation in specific (or “focal”) activities and in the activities
that embed self-regulation strategies in academic tasks. At the heart of theTools curriculum lie instructional strategies that promote mature, makebelieve play because Vygotskians consider such play the leading activity
for both preschool and kindergarten-aged children and dub it “the schoolfor deliberateness.”
		 Unlike those small-scale, Vygotsky-based interventions mostly deliveredby researchers, we designed Tools from its inception as a comprehensive
curriculum for regular classroom teachers in early childhood classrooms.
First developed and pilot tested in Denver, Colorado, in the 1990s, Tools
has expanded to many other states and has been implemented in a variety ofearly childhood settings, including public and private preschools and Head
Start programs, as well as half-day and full-day kindergarten classrooms.
Outside the United States, Tools has been used in Canada and Chile.
		 Developing a Vygotskian-based early childhood curriculum in thecontext of the American educational system presented us with a set ofchallenges. Some of them, like dealing with different educational philosophies and classroom practices, we expected. Others we had to face as they
emerged. One involved the tendency to “push down” content and pedagogy
initially designed for older children to kindergartners and even preschoolers. We had to maintain a fine balance between the ever-growing demandsof state and national academic standards and helping young children

Why Vygotsky [Still] Mattersdevelop those cognitive and social and emotional competencies culturalhistorical scholars consider developmental accomplishments unique topreschool and kindergarten age. For Tools, this meant we could adapt noneof the materials or activities simply from the curricula designed by postVygotskian educators in Russia or in Europe. Instead, we had to build themfrom the ground up in response to the specific demands of American earlychildhood classrooms. It also meant that to ensure successful implementation of the curriculum across the United States, we had to align Tools withpreschool and kindergarten learning standards and assessments in different
states and multiple school districts and programs. Finally, although manyof the Vygotskian-based instructional practices had been developed in thecontext of the fairly uniform state-run Soviet preschools, early childhood
education settings in the United States vary greatly in the quality of classroom, in the time children spend in the classroom, and in the professional
background of the teachers. Making Tools work in such diverse settings
and for different children added to the complexity of our endeavor.
AJP: How did you develop Tools of the Mind?
EB and DL: We were interested in the educational applications of the Vygotskian
approach, and we started with distilling the main principles of Vygotskianbased pedagogy based on the work of several generations of his students.
We soon realized that there is no way we could simply translate and adapt
the work of Russian educators, no matter how impressive their results.
Moreover, to try to do so would be inconsistent with the very premises of
the Vygotskian paradigm. This led to our attempts to design instructional
strategies consistent with the Vygotskian approach but at the same time,
fit for the social situations of American preschoolers and kindergartners
at the end of the twentieth century.
		 The first teachers’ concern we addressed involved children’s low selfregulation and the absence of effective strategies promoting self-regulation.
For Vygotsky, mastery of one’s own behavior is one of the developmental
accomplishments of early childhood, so we thought that using Vygotskianbased strategies could help children develop self-regulation. However, having observed teaching practices in many programs, we realized that theyoften do not support and sometimes even defeat efforts to improve children’s self-regulation. So, we had no choice but to develop an entire curriculum with all of its activities infused with self-regulation components.
We wanted to use Vygotskian principles of teaching and learning to close

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students and dual-language learners
		 This evolved into a curriculum and a professional development program to empower teachers with the understanding and tools they need tocreate positive classroom cultures, facilitate intentional, playful learning,and support the development of self-regulated learners who achieve theirfull potential. Because we also were researchers at heart, we engaged manysmall-scale and large-scale research projects, both to improve a specificactivity’s impact on learning and to improve the effectiveness of the curriculum and the program’s implementation. We used the results to improveand refine our approach, and the latest studies show the positive impact of
our efforts.
AJP: What are the goals of the curriculum?
EB and DL: The main goal of the curriculum is to promote the skills and competencies of children that Vygotskians consider the main developmental
accomplishments of early childhood—self-regulation, symbolic thinking,imagination, and the like. At the same time, the curriculum aims to equip
children with the tools of the mind consistent with current social andcultural expectations. In today’s American preschools and kindergartens,
these tools include literacy and numeracy.
		 Tools is more than a curriculum, it is equally a professional development program designed to empower teachers with the skills to create
positive classroom cultures that have intellectual equity, in which children
form a community of learners who support each other and teachers meeteach child’s ZPD through intentional, playful learning.
AJP: How has the Tools of the Mind curriculum changed over time? How haveyou responded to new studies and feedback?
EB and DL: Some things that did not change include our adherence to the
Vygotskian educational philosophy and our desire to keep the curriculum
consistent with this approach. When we had to add or modify an activity
to comply with the changes in state standards, we always made sure that
we did not compromise the integrity of the Vygotskian approach.
		 Most of the changes we made were not associated with the content orpedagogy but with the implementation of the curriculum. Multiple evaluation studies helped us detect the barriers to high-quality implementationand to make necessary changes and adjustments. For example, our materials are now more teacher friendly, and our professional development isWhy Vygotsky [Still] Mattersbetter suited for the diverse early childhood education work force.
		 One change has been an expansion in our scale and reach. Tools of
the Mind began in one school district with fifteen teachers in 1996. Now,
we reach forty thousand children a year in twenty-three states. Nine outof ten programs we serve continue to use it for many years after they aretrained. We are more sophisticated about measuring the effectiveness of
our approach, engaging in continuous improvement with the use of technology to support teachers. Data share partnerships allow us to monitor
and evaluate our professional development and our materials. Professional
development workshops and professional learning communities for teachers have arisen. Our implementation gets steadily better. We serve families
more effectively and leverage technology more efficiently. And a growing
body of research supports our approach.
AJP: You have suggested in your scholarship that describing the socialcultural, social-constructivist, or social-learning approach as the same as
the Vygotskian approach can be misleading. How so?
EB and DL: As we discussed in our chapter in the 2020 Scientific Influences on
Early Childhood Education (and in the third edition of Tools of the Mind),describing the Vygotskian approach as sociocultural, social-constructivist,and even (and quite confusingly so) as social learning underscores oneof the major distinguishing features of Vygotsky’s work: its emphasis on
the role of social interactions in the processes of children’s learning anddevelopment. Although these terms are useful when we wish to contrast
Vygotskian theory with the nativist theories of development or the behaviorist theories of learning, their use can sometimes lead to the misunderstanding or oversimplification of key Vygotskian ideas.
		 Vygotsky and his close colleagues used a different term—culturalhistorical—to describe their approach, and this term is now used by scholars who trace their philosophical lineage to Vygotsky’s students or to thestudents of Vygotsky’s students. To better understand Vygotskian views onchild development and education, it is important to unpack the concept of
the cultural-historical approach and to have a more nuanced understanding of its meaning.
		 Omitting the “history” from a description of the Vygotskian approach
undermines its developmental focus. This focus seems especially relevant
when we apply Vygotskian theory to early childhood education because
the same social interactions and culturally specific factors might play a

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		 In the cultural-historical approach, Vygotsky used the term culture in
two major ways—in the discussion of specific sociocultural environmentsthat shape children’s learning and development and also in the study of cultural tools such as signs and symbols and their role in human development.
It seems that the first aspect of culture received much more attention in thework of post-Vygotskians in the West, but in-depth studies of children’s
appropriation of specific cultural tools and of the resulting changes in their
psychological processes remained relatively rare. At the same time, it is thispart of Vygotsky’s legacy that makes it relevant for solving today’s challenges
of education in general and especially for early childhood education.
		 The term history in this approach is also used in a very specific context.
Vygotsky proposed that, to understand psychological processes, one needs
to study these processes as they change and develop, hence his focus on
history. Vygotsky argued that fully developed psychological processes are
hard to study because they usually exist in an internalized and “folded”
form in which many of the component processes are not easily accessible. Therefore, the methodology commonly employed by developmental
psychologists—such as longitudinal or cross-sectional design—can only
describe an outcome, not the process itself. At the same time, a process
undergoing development still has an extensive external component accessible to observation, which may provide researchers with an insight into
the nature of this particular process. The word historical in the culturalhistorical approach applies to the study of the development of psychologicalprocesses as they unfold both through an individual person’s history (orontogeny) and the history of humankind (or phylogeny). The latter explains
Vygotsky’s special interest in the development of children at an age whenthese processes are still taking shape.
		 In addition to understanding the terms Vygotskians use to describe
their approach, it is important to comment on one specific term: social
constructivism. When applied to the Vygotskian approach, this term meansthat children play an active role in constructing their knowledge—a view
we can contrast with the behaviorist approaches—and that children’s acquisition of knowledge is always mediated by their social interactions withothers (a view we can contrast with theories that consider children’s con-

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struction of knowledge an individual endeavor). In current educational
literature, social constructivism seems to have acquired different meanings,
some of them opposed to the beliefs of Vygotskians. Sometimes, this confusion of different meanings for the same term leads to unjustified criticismsof the Vygotskian approach.
AJP: One last question: If Vygotsky were alive today, what key principles fromthe cultural-historical education philosophy would he espouse to twentyfirst century early childhood educators?
EB and DL: There are several principles that we think are most important. We
can list the ones that can be directly applied to learning and teaching.
However, they cannot be viewed in isolation from more general principles
such as internalization—which suggests that each higher mental function
starts as intermental and later becomes internalized as intramental—andmediation, which suggests that human mental functioning involves the useof tools of the mind developed in the culture and transmitted via formal
and informal education.
		 The principles more directly associated with education include thatteaching and learning can lead to child development. Strategically selected
and properly taught, tools of the mind does not simply expand children’s
repertoire of knowledge and skills but actually propel children to the nextlevel of development.
		 And these key principles include of course the Zone of Proximal Development. Knowing each child’s ZPD allows teachers to plan the most effective teaching that is most likely to promote a child’s development. Most
assessments currently used in education capture only children’s actual
development as they focus on the skills fully developed at the time of testing. These assessments do not capture the skills still under development
and the skills that can emerge when we provide proper assistance. Ignoringchildren’s ZPD makes assessments less accurate and makes it harder to use
the assessment results to plan instruction.

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