ABSTRACT
This chapter links some ideas to reveal an explanatory framework which incorporates pedagogical experiences, long since developed in school contexts, in which students act as teachers of their own peers. It reviews the evidence from research about the concept of learning by teaching, as well as the potential and limitations of this learning device. The concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) has great appeal in explaining educational performance, where mediators must know the levels of development of their students in order to delimit the zone where the teacher's performance is going to be fruitful, in terms of promoting learning. In the context of formal education, it seems that the contextual conditions are no longer as favourable to the adult – especially as the prototypical constraints of the traditional classroom make it very difficult to establish generalized one-on-one interaction between teachers and students.
