But the best thing we can do, as parents and as educators, is to see the ability in our children and to give them the opportunity to build on it to have that ‘ah ha’ moment. That’s part of the process and that’s ok.
#SCAFFOLD MEANING IN TEACHING TRIAL#
There is a lot of trial and error, and noticing and guessing. Is it possible to always exist in the “sweet spot”? No! Definitely not. Jerome Bruner coined this process “scaffolding” in the 1970s as based on Vygotsky’s ideas. This is the amazing work of educators and parents, to observe their children and students, to find their sweet spot and to scaffold around it as best they can. What happens when we feel too bored or too frustrated? That depends on our coping strategies, but many of us lose focus, shift our attention, or if we’re talking about young kids, maybe you see it in their disruptive or isolating behavior.įinding that sweet spot is key. You can also think of it as the place between ‘too boring’ and ‘too frustrating’. In simple terms, this is the sweet spot right in between ‘too easy’ and ‘too hard’. Vygotsky (in the 1920’s and 1930’s) developed the idea of the “zone of proximal development”. Stronger foundations make things easier.Ī little bit of (interesting!) education history We do that by providing scaffolding along the way. We want to build their skills from the base.
We want our children’s foundation to be stable. You might be able to do it, but it’s not as stable as it could be. If you jump ahead to a top step, your foundation is rocky. You cannot understand multiplication if you don’t understand addition. In math, just like all cognitive abilities or academic subjects, there is a ladder. Or maybe we didn’t learn math from the bottom up a lot of us learned strategies to get us through, but without the fundamental understanding of number and mental math, these strategies become meaningless. Maybe we’ve learned from a young age that we are “just not good at math.” (That’s called a fixed mindset, by the way). Development is a trajectory, it does not always happen in a straight line, and it does not always happen the same for everyone, but with the right scaffolding in place, it continues to move upward.Ī lot of people don’t like math. You start with the foundation and build from the base. If you want to build a 20-story building, you don’t start with the top floor. Just like the scaffolding on a building that is being constructed, the platforms provide a base for the builders to keep building up. It is a way to think about how we introduce new concepts to our children or students to help them develop their thinking. ‘Scaffolding’ in teaching is a term used in education to describe the way teachers can support a child’s learning in the classroom. Maybe you needed to try it yourself and make mistakes before you understood fully. Maybe you needed extra support or to be taught in a different format. Maybe it took a lot longer for you than other people.
Now think of a time you were unsuccessful in learning a new skill. Can you remember what it felt like when you were introduced to the new skill? Do you remember how it was taught to you? Can you remember having an “ah ha” moment where something clicked? What did it feel like? Maybe it was in school, in sport, or at work. Think about a time when you were successful in learning a new skill.
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