a response to the chapter in Kirschner, P. A., & Hendrick, C. (2020). How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice. Routledge
It is nice to know the origin of the word scaffolding in the sense of supporting students through a process till they can manage it alone. And they say this article is the first time that idea was mooted, that up till Bruner people thought learning was all copying models and memorisation rather than leading the learner to taking steps themselves that would result in understanding on their part. But this chapter is another that raises more questions than answers. Especially as it talks about scaffolding from the task, but also to the position of the individual learner.
The piece is by Bruner and about small children, but it seems to apply in many ways to any learning. I looked at the original article, but this time the book seems to put it across pretty well and the only thing the article adds ıs a photo of the block puzzle whıch explaıns why ıt needed scaffoldıng ın the fırst place. The diagram in the Kirschner book makes it look like a simple pyramid.
In the study they have adults with 3,4 and 5 year old children and they want to describe systematically how a child responds to support from an adult (or a non expert working with an expert). One remark in the abstract I need to explore further though is
The focus here is on problem-finding activities as opposed to problem-solving activities (Mackworth, 1965).
The study was designed so the adult would only act in response to what the child seemed to need – they didn’t have a fixed path pre planned to lead the child through. But if the child ignored the task the adult would show them how to pair blocks, if the child started building but in a flawed way the teacher could point this out verbally and the adult should allow them to correct any mistakes they made.
Different age groups responded better to being shown things or told things.
What was key is that the adult has to have knowledge of the outcome or solution, but also to be able to envisage where the child is in this context e.g. what the child currently sees the solution as in order to be able to pitch help well.
Bruner describes six stages of scaffolding.
- Recruitment – generating interest in the problem at all.
- Reduction of degrees of freedom – offering choices that are appropriately narrow so as not to overwhelm.
- Direction maintenance – keeping them on task and moving through the task.
- Marking critical features – making steps clear.
- Frustration control – don’t make steps too easy or the child ends up dependent on the teacher creating steps.
- Demonstrating – modelling but in a way that makes getting to the solution clear.
And their takeaways from this are laudable and abstract. I guess it is good to have it articulated, but also to have it illustrated would be more useful.
But in terms of language teaching and teacher training it makes me think…
- Recruitment – if you have students who have paid for a course or teachers who have paid for training you would hope they would be interested in ‘the problem’, but given that some learners are paid for and sent in both contexts and that there is a difference between having a long term goal of speaking X or having the Delta it could be relevant. But how ? That comes back to classic questions about motivation and to what degree and where sheer enjoyment can (or should which is another argument) be built into things.
- Reduction of degrees of freedom sounds right in most contexts. Too many choices and you might as well not be supervised at all, but judging where appropriately narrow lies will be the hard part.
- Direction maintenance also sounds as though it could make sense in any area of life. We all need nudges now and again for most things.
4, 5 and 6 seem more complex.
- Marking critical features. You often think you have done this (you design the lesson – language or anything else – with the idea of stages that feed into the aim), but only in the actual implementation do you discover if you succeeded or not and I have always enjoyed teaching things a few times over as then you can refine the steps to the point where they usually do work in practice.
- Frustration control is also a really difficult balance. The more support we put in place, the less they are learning to do things independently, but in both language learning and teacher training you are hoping to foster a capacity to go on learning for life. But in both scenarios learners seem to look for more and more support. Or is that just that I didn’t even notice them asking in the past ?
- Demonstrating. This is the only one where I’m not really sure if I have it straight for language learning. In teacher training it feels like the problem of seeing things done well, but therefore having no real sense of how much was done to make them work well – kind of the swan gliding past and you don’t see it’s feet paddling madly below the water. This subject often comes up when trainees want to see ‘good’ lessons and while of course you can learn from that, sometimes you can learn a great deal from seeing something go wrong.
In language learning do you think it could be that if you only see proficient speakers, you become disheartened at your own lack of language ?
sallyhirst 