better education; icerocket trends

Icerocket statistics look a bit like scaffolds, don't they? According to icerocket trend, there were about 4600 - 4900 posts on education and learning every day in the past three months, against only 20 on scaffolding. I'm guessing this means scaffolding is not yet very known to many who write about education. That's a real pitty, because it is a method that builds children, adolescents and adults and we know already, that there is a relationship between the development of skills and frustration. If we want to do things better, more scaffolding techniques is one of the ways.

Scaffolding, multitasking and house-improvement

Scaffolding, multitasking and house-improvement is my actual life. My father built and rabuilt 3 scaffolds in one morning (5 meters high) (how many inches is that?). Not virtual but touchable scaffolds. At the same time I saw how he built virtual scaffolds for me, for my children and even for my husband. Our family benefitted from his visit at multiple levels. I see where my youngst and oldest get there energy from. "I've got magical energy!" said the youngst. It is true. My oldest is recuperating from everything. She starts feeling better about herself. It's such a fine line between giving support and increasing dependent behavior. Art is doing the scaffolding, science is thinking how to and when.

Difficult puzzle, scaffolding & automatisation

Difficult puzzles need a strategy to be able to solve them. Smart children just try solving them, trusting their solving skills rather than a strategy. This works until they face a puzzle that seems not to work in that way. Then they have to try something called multilayered strategy. This is exactly the aim of scaffolding, getting insight in structure of solution, rather than being able to just solve the puzzle without having to worry how they did it.
In the midst of this comes emotions that are new to smart children: failure, frustration, stress... These emotions are often successfully avoided because smart children often can solve problems easily. When the puzzle is difficult enough, they get the chance to experience these emotions. A good teacher knows that emotions are a part of education. It is good to reflect on the emotions. What happened? How did you feel?
Then the child has to finish the task anyway. This means perseverance. The more perseverance, the better the child will feel when it does succeed to solve the problem in the end.
When they succeeded to solve the difficult puzzle, accompanied with the necessary frustration, the next step is to teach the child to automatize the puzzle.

binary principle and elephant puzzle

How is a puzzle like the elephant puzzle used to scaffold? (in education, but you can do it among friends too) Well, for one the trick is that you don't need to know how to solve every independent puzzle (exceptions disregarded) to know how to solve a puzzle. For some puzzles, understanding laws is necessary or useful. How switches can be written down as either on or off may be helpful for solving a binary puzzle. Also, the idea of how to list numbers may be important. 00001 comes before 00010 and after 00000.
In the list 00, 01, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111 notice that the last digit changes every time from 0 to 1, before the left digit can change. This also is the case with the elephant puzzle.
This is how a puzzle gives deep insight of maths and logic. Deep because it is a direct experience. It makes a connection between a concept in your head and a visual tactile experience in your hands.

educator doubts

I'm a mother and I have a problem. I have the urge to do scaffolding with everyone around me. I don't know at what age this started, if I did it before my children were born, or when I was young, but I tend to get into a discussion and take the level higher, if I can. Of course this will be difficult when I know nothing about the subject, but I do try. I will even turn a discussion about cars to a discussion about design and psychology in order to be able to scaffold... I even give puzzles to men in their hands who then start trying to solve the cube of Rubic and then get frustrated. I even don't stop at young men, I even try to get older people to play. Do you think this is annoying? Please tell me.

from special to mainstream education

I gave a link to an explanation on scaffolding before. The idea was first followed in special education. It is very popular right now. I see a trend that novel education ideas are first used with the children that have the highest need for help (mediation) by their higher educated teachers and then when it is succesful finds its way to other childrens education. Autism is a spectrum where there is high need of help in education. Many autistic children can only learn with intensive training and don't transfer knowledge. Others function at a high level, but have typical impairments. One way of support for parents is looking at other parents who use techniques with their children, e.g. a video on scaffolding.

Scaffolding

What is scaffolding and the relation to Vygotski (1978)?
http://mediablog.mail2web.com/Constructivism/blog/

Scaffolding is the method that we want for our children, because it means effort and real learning.