[Week 8] Scaffolding

Scaffolding is of particular interest to me because it seems, to an extent, to be very similar to my primary method of instruction in the classroom. As an instrumental music teacher, the learner task is exceedingly complex, and requires the connection of physical motor skills to aural processing and identification, which then must both connect to intellectual reasoning. Failure rate of tasks is 100%, no person succeeds on their first attempt. But ultimately, the goal is to fade the highly detailed, direct instruction into scaffolding, and, hopefully, to fade the scaffolding altogether. "My goal," I used to tell my students, "is to make it so that you don't need me."

Looking over the reading, I see that I did not spend much time on meta-cognitive scaffolding, but heavily used the other three. I'm not entirely sure that my instruction would count as scaffolding, since I never set out to make my classroom a place for inquiry based learning. This begs a question - to what extent should scaffolding be different from direct instruction? My initial thought is that the scaffolding seems to be less oriented to success/failure and more toward 'what you don't know'/'what you need to know.'

What do you think? How does scaffolding compare with detailed instruction for physical tasks?

[Week 7] Continued

After reading more about storytelling as an element of instructional designed, I feel compelled to reflect on something I posted in Chris' blog, which I will repost here:

"There is also a component of storytelling that I find very interesting – good storytellers seldom tell stories that are 100% true. In one way this is negative – how can we trust the story? how can we be sure it is true? In another way, it is positive – it allows the storyteller to convey the truth of the emotional experience. As a simple example: A fisherman lands a big fish. When he tells the story of how big it was, he exaggerates. Why is this? I feel it is because he needs to convey the truth of his experience, which is the extent of his surprise, joy, and excitement at catching the fish. So, when he tells the story, that fish is not 30 inches long and 7.4 pounds. It is "three FEET and 8 WHOLE POUNDS! It nearly snapped the rod in half", the line didn’t just make noise under tension," it was SINGING!"…etc…

In my mind, this is where the power of the story lays – it allows the teller to emphasize the interaction between facts (the world) and meaningful experience. I feel this is why mythical stories persist for so long. Harnessing the power of stories for instruction is not easy, primarily because the learners are, in many ways, living in a different world than the instructors, and so it is hard to know what they will find compelling.

I have also seen and used stories to indoctrinate newcomers to a specific mentality. Teaching people to rock climb, I tend to repeat the way I was taught: Direct instruction, Mnemonics, and stories. Direct instruction is: "Do x in situation y because z." Mnemonics helped encode important ideas (SRENE for the development of solid anchors). Stories, however, served to initiate the learner into the mentality required for survival in high angle environments. Also, they were designed to cultivate a mentality that respects, but is not controlled by fear and danger. There were also hero and blunder stories, many of which had instruction imbedded into them. These stories composed a mythology and historical record of climbers in the Red River Gorge, with main characters starting in about 1968 until the present day.

I think designing stories for instruction is tricky, particularly since authenticity is elusive. Some considerations:

1) Is the story authentic? Real stories are about events that are important in people's lives, or are unusual or interesting for one reason or another.

2) Is it memorable? Story construction, level of detail, irony, fulfillment or denial of expectation, and content can each play a role.

3) How well does it intersect with the learner's experience? Stories that the learner has no ability to relate to do not work well. For example, telling a story about how you were halfway up a climbing route, were" totally pumped, greasing off, and you found out you were out of #1's, 20 foot run out from your last piece, and had to downclimb the crux..." That story has no meaning to someone who is not a specific type of climber. Stories must be relevant.

4) Details matter: if the story content matches well with the learner's experience, then details add an important depth to the story. This is a place where learning happens. Details set up the story for its lesson - Did the hero remember to do x, y, and z? How much time did he spend doing x, y, z. Detail is a place where a concept can be repeated, and made more important.

What would you add?

Having just recently learned about the gradebook feature in oncourse, and learning more about the purpose of the blogs, I see that I have been a bit off track. To rectify this, I will re-write my week 3 and 5 posts, and make more direct connections to the content of the readings from those weeks.

[Week 7] Storytelling Research


Once upon a time, I used many stories to teach in my band classes. At first, it seemed that I told stories to simply increase student interest. These stories were not very instructional at first. Most were anecdotal, and, while they may have been good for a laugh, or an 'oh really?' moment, they did not seem to add much to class, except for the fact that I enjoyed telling them, and students enjoyed listening. I told them because I remembered how much I enjoyed my teachers' stories, and how much I looked forward to these moments. They seemed to be downtime, a brief break from the work of learning. Then one day, I was teaching a high school group how to develop an internal sense of rhythm, as the students were diligently (and heavily) stomping their feet to help them keep time. The concert: two days away. It was the group's first rehearsal together on a concert stage. The band sounded beautiful except for one thing: the students, as trained, were tapping their feet to keep time. The result was a beautiful, transcripted adagio aria punctuated with the sound of a slow death march, feet drudgingly pounding out the beauty of the melody. To put it in visual terms, it was like a beautiful painting being repetitively stabbed with a pencil.

To help them, it occurred to me to tell them a story I remembered from music history class.

The hero? Jean-Baptise Lully. French composer of incredible renown in his time, he was the leader of an orchestra, back when an orchestra was something of a new thing, and a very, very big deal. His compositions were loved for their rich harmony, and he was widely celebrated. Unfortunately, his demise came from precisely the problem my band was having. "You see" I described to the class, "He used a rather heavy and pointed stick to keep time for his orchestra. I tap my baton on the podium sometimes to help you keep time, but, maybe I should, maybe we should, learn from the fall of this hero. You see, was furiously trying to get his orchestra to stay together, pounding his stick on his podium - which turned out to be a fatal mistake. In a careless move, he stabbed his foot with the stick. His wound? It became infected with gangrene, which killed him." The students, somewhat shocked, needed a little description of how this could be. After a short description, I said "Let's not follow in his footsteps. Feel the rhythm with your body, not with your foot, but in your torso..." This initiated a lesson on how to do exactly that. The resulting lesson went very well.  

This served as my first experience of the use of stories to serve a specific instructional purpose.

Reading the Andrews article, and attempting to categorize the various types of stories I have told is a very interesting idea - and it crystallizes for me the usefulness of planning stories ahead of time, and being intentional, rather than 'spur of the moment' in my use of storytelling. While I feel that storytelling best suits environments where success is difficult or important, I also wonder about its applications in other settings. What are your thoughts?

Ok, I know we are done with infographics - but here is one I found that you may find relevant:

My infographic: What will Americans eat during the Superbowl?

At long last, I have found a way to make my infographic. While my initial ideas were good, making them proved to be impossible. While I was sleeping, it came to me: A TIMELINE is the correct and most attainable design. My initial designs were beyond my ability to create. I will update with drafts today!