Reading Response - Scaffolding: An Important Teacher Competency in Online Learning

When reading Nada Dabbagh's take on scaffolding in her article, "Scaffolding: An Important Teacher Competency in Online Learning," I immediately thought of the process of learning how to do the splits. In the article, Dabbagh indicates that an important part of scaffolding includes "supporting novice learners by limiting the complexities of the learning context and gradually removing those limits (a concept known as fading) as learners gain knowledge, skills, and confidence to cope with the full complexity of the context" (Dabbagh, pg. 39). This practice is unavoidable in learning to do the splits as, in this endeavor, the lack of appropriate scaffolding through fading techniques can have immediately evident, disastrous results - pulling muscles, or worse, tearing them. This can lead to an extensive and painful healing process that could easily have been avoided.

For many activities (dance, gymnastics, martial arts, etc.) the ability to do the splits is an important skill without which the highest levels of achievement cannot be attained. For some, this is a skill that comes easily. For others, it is a skill that comes only after many long hours of practice. In my own dance classes, learning to do the splits was a long and often frustrating process. However, proper fading techniques kept it from being an injuring and painful process. That's not to say that it wasn't difficult, it was. However, the emphasis on starting at your current ability level and approaching improvement from a responsible and cautious standpoint led to the slow and steady development of the strength and flexibility needed to achieve the splits.

This learning process allowed each student to progress at his/her own pace. Students who could already do the splits were able to use the practice time to solidify their current abilities as well as add more challenging exercises or work with peers to deepen and improve their skills. Students who were not already skilled in doing the splits (e.g., me), began by sinking as far as they could reasonably go into the splits until the stretch was uncomfortable, but not unbearable (the edge of our current abilities), using our arms as appropriate scaffolding tools to allow us to control the depth of our stretch. If our arms were not long enough, we were encouraged to use yoga blocks, the barre or other similar tools, but never to push the stretch past the edge of our current abilities and into potential injury. As we built strength and flexibility in our leg muscles, we were slowly able to lower increasingly further into the stretch - relying less and less on our scaffolding tools and more and more on our developing capabilities.

Asking students to progress at the same pace regardless of their ability level would only have served to either frustrate advanced students by limiting their potential or injure/frustrate novice students by pushing them too far, too fast. Neither of these options would have resulted in the desired learning outcomes for this particular exercise. As Dabbagh puts it, "Too much scaffolding could result in dampening students' efforts to actively pursue their learning goals, causing them to lose their momentum or drive towards meaning making and self-directed learning efforts, and too little scaffolding could result in students' inability to successfully complete or perform certain tasks and instructional activities, leading to anxiety, frustration, and finally loss of motivation and attrition" (Dabbagh, pg. 40).

In online learning environments, the lines designating appropriate scaffolding levels are not so clearly drawn. If I require students to perform an activity that is far beneath their current skill level, I'm unlikely to immediately see their boredom. If I ask students to complete a task that is far beyond their current skill level, there isn't going to be an immediate injury showing I made a grave error. However, it's important to remember that in these online learning environments it is as ridiculous to require advanced students to work at basic levels as it is to require advanced dancers to hold themselves up when trying to do the splits. Similarly, it is as dangerous to push less technologically-advanced students to anxiety and frustration through a lack of appropriate scaffolding as it is to ask dancers who don't have the ability to do the splits to perform them without first going through the process of developing the necessary strength and flexibility to do the splits without injury.

To account for this gap in immediate student feedback, it is important for me to build scaffolding opportunities directly into online learning environments by asking students to take an active role in shaping their own learning goals and by using that information to coach and assess students in ways that consistently address their individualized skill-levels and learning abilities.

Source
Dabbagh, Nada. "Scaffolding: An Important Teacher Competency in Online Learning." TechTrends 47.2: 39-44. Print.