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"Master the Art of Teaching: Unlocking Science-Based Methods for Effective Education"
00:04:30 Five Key Pedagogical Approaches
00:15:11 The Brain’s Strengths and Limitations
00:27:50 Scaffolding: the Power of Baby Steps
00:34:38 Takeaways
How to Teach Anything: Break Down Complex Topics and Explain with Clarity, While Keeping Engagement and Motivation (Learning how to Learn Book 13) By Peter Hollins
Hear it Here - https://bit.ly/TeachKidsHollins
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TVXZYCP
Science-based methods for the most comprehension and retention. Teach more in less time.
There is a reason that education, teaching, and pedagogy are all areas of intense research and study. They are complicated! But just because you don’t have the fanciest PhDs or certifications, doesn’t mean that you can’t teach just as effectively. Learn how in this book.
For teachers, parents, professors, tutors, and even just friends.
How to Teach Anything takes what academics know about education and pedagogy, and translates it all into real-world skills and techniques. The learning brain works is very predictable ways, and we can use this to our advantage. Whether you are a student, tutor, professor, teacher, or even TA, understand how information takes hold and becomes useful.
Learn how to teach, and you also learn how to learn.
How to instill a mindset of curiosity, critical thinking, and discovery.
Peter Hollins has studied psychology and peak human performance for over a dozen years and is a bestselling author. He is one of the foremost authors on self-education and learning. He has worked with a multitude of individuals to unlock their potential and path towards success. His writing draws on his academic, coaching, and research experience.
Ensure academic success and keep students motivated and coming back for more.
•What the science of education has taught us about teaching.
•How a simple progression of thinking activities will cement learning.
•How Greek philosophers thought and why it matters in teaching.
•Keeping motivation and engagement, even through the tough times.
•How to deliver feedback effectively and gently.
•How to create an environment of safety and taking risks.
Teaching is the ability to affect lives. Increase your teaching skills, and you will increase your personal impact.
Teaching is a skill used in all walks of life. It’s actually the ability to clearly communicate and disseminate information. And if you want to help anyone, that is what you will be doing: family members, spouses, co-workers, bosses, children, and more. .
Transcript
Are you tired of feeling like your lessons or instructions fall flat?
Speaker:What if the secret to truly impactful teaching lies not in what you know, but how you share it?
Speaker:Hello listeners, welcome to the Science of Self on July 2, 2025, where you improve your lives from the inside out.
Speaker:Today's featured book is How to Teach Anything, Breakdown Complex Topics and Explain with Clarity while Keeping Engagement and Motivation by, of course, Peter Hollins.
Speaker:This is in the Learning How to Learn book series.
Speaker:Now, don't let that scare you off if you're not a teacher.
Speaker:You teach more than you realize.
Speaker:If you deal with people in almost any aspect, you're doing some form of teaching and there's some good information in this episode that you can apply.
Speaker:This episode specifically pulls chapter one from the book, Lessons from the Science of Pedagogy.
Speaker:What is pedagogy?
Speaker:You might ask.
Speaker:Pedagogy is the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.
Speaker:To get into the topic, Peter Hollins starts off with the five key pedagogical approaches.
Speaker:These are just frameworks for how you approach teaching or instructing.
Speaker:He lists five, the constructive, fist approach, the integrative approach, collaborative, inquiry-based, and the reflective approach.
Speaker:Effectively, using these approaches, of course, depends on the brain's strengths and limitations, and that's the next section in this chapter.
Speaker:And we present some strategies for keeping your material focused on particular topics.
Speaker:Making information as much as you can, and appealing to the senses in ways that pique attention.
Speaker:If you incorporate those, your communication will be much stronger.
Speaker:We look into the concept of scaffolding the power of baby steps.
Speaker:Scaffolding is the principle of making small improvements and building big concepts or skills from smaller, simpler ones.
Speaker:It's the process where the teacher will gradually hand over control and mastery to the student.
Speaker:We appreciate you joining us today.
Speaker:Make sure to check out the takeaways at the end if you want a quick summary of the episode.
Speaker:And once again, this is chapter one, Lessons from the Science of Pedagogy from Peter Hollins' book, How to Teach Anything, Breakdown Complex Topics and Explain with Clarity, While Keeping Engagement and Motivation.
Speaker:Thanks for joining us.
Speaker:Here's the audio chapter.
Speaker:Imagine you are with a friend who has asked you to show them how to do something that you’re an expert in.
Speaker:They know nothing and need to be taught.
Speaker:How do you go about doing this?
Speaker:Most of us are more familiar with being in the shoes of the student and not the teacher, and when we’re put on the spot like this, we’re confronted with an interesting perspective: seeing knowledge from the perspective of the one who has to communicate it to someone else.
Speaker:You probably had a few favorite teachers in school or university, but what exactly made them so effective?
Speaker:If you consider yourself a lifelong student and autodidact, you probably know that your theoretical approach, your attitude and your methods make all the difference.
Speaker:In this book we’ll be looking at learning, but through the less common perspective of a teacher.
Speaker:But rather than focusing on the philosophy of education in general or on school curricula, we’ll be exploring the most fundamental underpinnings of what makes an excellent teacher, whether it’s formally in the classroom or simply when helping out a friend.
Speaker:The wonderful side effect is that mastering the role of an effective teacher has a way of making you a better learner, as you become familiar with learning and knowledge acquisition as a worthy subject in itself.
Speaker:We’ll start with the foundations of pedagogy, or the study of education and learning.
Speaker:But hopefully, by the end of this book, you’ll be able to use these general principles in creative ways that extend well beyond the standard teacher-student context.
Speaker:Five Key Pedagogical Approaches
Speaker:41 00:04:33,040 --> 00:04:42,320 Teaching is in essence a kind of conversation, where new information is communicated and conveyed to a person who doesn’t possess it.
Speaker:The approach you take depends on how you see the student, the teacher, the relationship between them, the information, and the rules governing the transfer of knowledge.
Speaker:To teach your friend what you know, you could start with what they already understand, then build from there.
Speaker:For example, you teach a basic principle first, or draw on their existing knowledge of concepts, to expand and introduce something new.
Speaker:You strengthen this new acquisition by engaging in problem-solving tasks.
Speaker:Your role as a teacher is basically to lay out a useful obstacle course for your student, who, in moving through it, learns new things.
Speaker:This is called a constructivist approach.
Speaker:This is a great way to teach complex ideas, and it works because it builds these major concepts up from smaller, simpler ones.
Speaker:The student masters these then moves on in a structured way.
Speaker:For example, students often learn an instrument in this manner—first master the scales, reading music and basic handling of the instrument before moving on to more and more complex combinations of those skills.
Speaker:If you’re teaching more than one person, say two friends together, utilize the constructivist approach by creating an environment of collaboration between the students.
Speaker:Instead of proceeding in a highly structured manner like some other methods, you use what they both know as the basis for how you go about relaying what you want to teach.
Speaker:Analogies are a particularly useful way to do this and allows students to “construct” an understanding of a new concept based on the old one.
Speaker:However, one drawback of this approach is that it can be unstructured.
Speaker:Some students struggle to make connections between different concepts and just don’t learn well that way.
Speaker:They require structure and would prefer to be told exactly how to think and understand something, rather than being expected to construct their own understanding of concepts.
Speaker:(McLeod 2019)
Speaker:59 00:06:46,840 --> 00:06:48,280 But you can take another approach.
Speaker:Did you ever sit in a classroom as a child, and wonder, “what’s the point of all this?” because you couldn’t understand how to apply the lesson to the “real world”?
Speaker:You wouldn’t have thought so if your teacher had used what’s called an integrative approach, i.e.
Speaker:teaching that embeds new knowledge in a practical, applied way.
Speaker:An example is a language teacher who has students role play certain encounters they’d likely have in a different country, like ordering food in a restaurant.
Speaker:This approach works because it takes dry, abstract knowledge and makes it come alive in context.
Speaker:A student is far more likely to be inspired and engaged with a lesson if they know what it all means, and how it functions practically in the world.
Speaker:This is probably why you’ve forgotten everything you learnt about trigonometry in high school—you never needed to apply those skills in everyday life!
Speaker:Of course, you can imagine that some kinds of knowledge lend themselves to an integrative approach more than others.
Speaker:On the other hand, your favorite schoolteachers were likely those that understood this principle and worked hard to make even “boring” subjects seem relevant, current and interesting.
Speaker:Staying with your memories of school, can you recall that teacher that would regularly say, “OK, now everyone get into groups of four”?
Speaker:Some students loathe groupwork, but there’s good reason to use the collaborative approach in the classroom and out of it.
Speaker:Collaboration is about using teamwork to share the process of learning in a group.
Speaker:Some educational researchers have found that learning is enhanced when people work on something together, and you can imagine why.
Speaker:Humans are social creatures, and the process of explaining, communicating, negotiating, clarifying and even arguing can bring a topic more sharply into focus than if you had merely sat down quietly on your own with it.
Speaker:With a collaborative approach, the teacher leverages other students to act as co-teachers.
Speaker:It’s almost a guarantee that every student in a group will have different strengths and skills, but this means that students can simultaneously help others in some respects, while being supported by other students in areas where they are weaker.
Speaker:A kind of self-correction happens in groups, where the whole seems greater than the sum of the parts.
Speaker:The teacher in this case can act as a member of the group, or be more of a detached facilitator who arranges the conditions under which the group operates.
Speaker:We can imagine this approach in a school where a science teacher asks small groups to work together on conducting an experiment and compiling a scientific report.
Speaker:This requires them to identify their respective skills and allocate different tasks accordingly, seeing the whole come together and (hopefully) drawing on one another’s skills and knowledge.
Speaker:But this approach works out of classrooms just as easily, and many people naturally take this approach when teaching.
Speaker:For example, a manager teaching new staff how to operate a machine may ask slightly more experienced staff to do the training while she supervises.
Speaker:This way the current staff get to reinforce their knowledge at the same time as they teach others.
Speaker:In a way, these more experienced staff members are closer to the new recruits than the manager, and remember what it was like not to know how to operate the machine.
Speaker:The manager can leverage this knowledge and “teach” mainly by facilitating a natural sharing process.
Speaker:Another highly effective pedagogical technique is the inquiry-based approach.
Speaker:As the name suggests, this method puts questions at the heart of the learning process.
Speaker:When you think about it, this is naturally how learning unfolds within us—we ask, What is this?
Speaker:How does it work?
Speaker:Why did XYZ happen?
Speaker:What will happen next?
Speaker:How can I get from A to B?
Speaker:The inquiry-based approach works with the question, the answer, and the part in between.
Speaker:For example, a “confirmation inquiry” lays out the question, its answer, and the method used to arrive at the answer.
Speaker:This confirms for students how it’s done.
Speaker:You could also pose a more “structured inquiry” and give the student a question and the method to answer it, but allow them to find the answer themselves.
Speaker:A “guided inquiry” is to simply offer a question, and the student is tasked with creating their own method for arriving at the solution, as well as the solution itself.
Speaker:Finally, you could offer nothing—no question, method, or answer, and let the student devise all three for themselves.
Speaker:This last approach is an “open inquiry” and fundamentally underpins such educational approaches as the Montessori method.
Speaker:Here, children of different ages are grouped together and allowed to pursue whatever it is that they want to learn.
Speaker:This leaves them to come up with their own questions pertaining to that interest, after which they devise methods to answer them too.
Speaker:Using questions this way spurs students to think through novel problems themselves, rather than a teacher simply handing inert information to them.
Speaker:You could say, “If we solved the old problem in such-and-such a way, how should we solve this new problem?” You are laying out a question and method, and nudging your student toward the right answer.
Speaker:On the other hand, you might hand a friend three books and ask them to devise a question they think best taps into the material contained in all three.
Speaker:This triggers them to not only seek solutions and new methods, but to even frame their own inquiries from the beginning.
Speaker:While this method has many benefits, such as its unique ability to foster curiosity, it comes with some drawbacks.
Speaker:For one, it can be very difficult for a teacher to prepare for an inquiry-based approach.
Speaker:Exhaustively teaching a concept through a series of questions and answers takes much more effort than other approaches.
Speaker:The method can also fall flat if your students can’t answer the questions you’ve prepared for them.
Speaker:In the worst case, it might even make them feel embarrassed and lower their confidence, especially if they have learning disabilities or aren’t quick thinkers.
Speaker:(Gutierrez 2018)
Speaker:112 00:13:21,440 --> 00:13:25,720 If you’re wondering whether these approaches can be blended, the answer is yes.
Speaker:The reflective approach, in fact, is one final pedagogical method that places regular reflection at the center of learning.
Speaker:Though all these approaches are valuable for different reasons, none will work if they’re applied unthinkingly to inappropriate situations.
Speaker:Under the reflexive approach, the teacher regularly stops and appraises the techniques being used, and adjusts accordingly.
Speaker:Is what you’re doing actually working for this student, and this topic, in this moment?
Speaker:Why or why not?
Speaker:What would work better?
Speaker:Trainee teachers are often encouraged to stay in reflective mode as they themselves learn what is effective and what isn’t, and why.
Speaker:This approach highlights an important principle: that teaching is practical—it’s about what works.
Speaker:There are no topics too difficult or students too stupid, only methods that are unsuitable.
Speaker:When you take on the reflective perspective, you remind yourself that teaching is just a tool, and that you can and should try different approaches to reach your ultimate goal.
Speaker:This promotes experimentation, but like the inquiry-based approach, it demands a lot of effort from the teacher to devise strategies for teaching approaches that are new to them.
Speaker:Everything in the chapters that follow refers back to one or more of these five pedagogical approaches, in one way or another.
Speaker:It’s worth remembering that although much of the available theory on teaching and learning is designed for conventional classrooms, these approaches and methods are universal, and your imagination is the only limit when it comes to where and how you apply them.
Speaker:The Brain’s Strengths and Limitations
Speaker:128 00:15:16,160 --> 00:15:18,680 The brain isn’t a machine.
Speaker:Though it sometimes acts a little like a computer processor, it’s not—it’s a biological entity with natural constraints on its ability to take on new information or focus.
Speaker:Many self-help guides that promise superhuman memory or ultra-productivity would have us believe that the brain can be whipped into shape if only we try hard enough.
Speaker:In fact, we are more likely to learn well—and teach well—if we work within our brain’s limits rather than push against them.
Speaker:We need to be strategic.
Speaker:The pedagogical approaches we’ve covered will only work when we allow our students (and ourselves) enough time, space, patience and adequate challenge to really learn.
Speaker:The most optimal path is the balanced one, with plenty of time to rest and integrate new material.
Speaker:So, whatever approach is taken and whatever it is that is being learnt, the volume and intensity of learning needs to match and respect the brain’s inbuilt capacities, and not exceed them—otherwise your teaching is all for nothing.
Speaker:Enter a model called the “cognitive load theory,” which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Speaker:In a nutshell, this theory reminds us that the brain can mostly only do one new thing at a time.
Speaker:Seeing this, we need to prioritize what that thing is.
Speaker:Psychologist John Sweller proposed the theory in 1998 to explain how the brain encounters, processes and stores new information.
Speaker:When learning something new, we use our working memory, but once the information is assimilated, we commit it to long-term memory in the form of mental schemas.
Speaker:When we learn something new, it takes a lot more cognitive energy than retrieving something already learnt and “banked.” This is cognitive load, and, just like your muscles have natural limits to the physical loads they can bear, your brain has limits to what it can mentally carry.
Speaker:Short-term memory, in other words, is a limited resource, and if we want to be the best learners or teachers we can, we need to work smart with what we have.
Speaker:One obvious way to enhance learning or teaching is to make efforts to reduce cognitive load.
Speaker:You want to get the most learning out of the least possible “spend” of cognitive energy.
Speaker:How can you do this?
Speaker:Well, if you want to move a massive pile of stones from here to there and you only have a small wheelbarrow, the method is obvious: you tackle it gradually, one small load at a time.
Speaker:This is like altering the content of what is learnt to make it easier to absorb.
Speaker:If you ask your student to break things down into chunks, to simplify, or to work with summaries, you are reducing cognitive load by altering the content the brain has to process.
Speaker:But there are other ways to lighten the load.
Speaker:You could focus on steps or stages in a sequence, rather than try to digest the whole all at once.
Speaker:This means we break things down temporally for students.
Speaker:First, just consider the beginning.
Speaker:Once that’s achieved, look at the next step, and so on, building as you go.
Speaker:A biology teacher could show you the working of a tiny element in an ecosystem, and keep zooming out, showing how every larger element connects to the others.
Speaker:The entire picture is too much to take in at once, but more manageable when told as a sequence or story with a beginning and an end.
Speaker:Put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to learn a new concept in chemistry.
Speaker:They might pick up a book on the topic and try to grasp it, but keep on encountering terms like “optical chirality” and “enantiomers.” They need to stop reading and go and look for definitions of these terms, but when they do, they realize there are even more terms they need to understand before they can comprehend those ones.
Speaker:Pretty overwhelming, right?
Speaker:The trouble here is that the person is attempting to work on two levels at once, juggling the use and application of certain concepts while also trying to properly understand those concepts.
Speaker:There is too much in working memory and not enough in long-term memory to draw on.
Speaker:What happens?
Speaker:The brain is overloaded and no new schemas can be built.
Speaker:If you’re the teacher, however, and you understand cognitive load theory, the idea is that you can deliberately create a learning environment that guides your student in such a way as to decrease their cognitive load, direct their focus, and help them build up useful schemas, step by step.
Speaker:In our example, a good teacher can say, “Look, you need to start with this concept first, then move on to this material, and then put it all together with this final piece, here.” The idea is to look at how the brain ordinarily learns new things, and recreate that deliberately.
Speaker:Scholars and researchers who have examined this theory often disagree on exactly how it might be applied in the classroom.
Speaker:For example, does reducing cognitive load mean handing ready-made explanations to students so they expend as little cognitive energy possible, which they could use to form new schemas?
Speaker:This certainly would fly in the face of the experience of many teachers, who have found that providing partial solutions can be more effective.
Speaker:Another dilemma arises when considering the use of audio-visual materials.
Speaker:While these tend to reduce cognitive load when used sparingly, overdoing it can actually increase the cognitive burden.
Speaker:Remember, though, that our aim in this book is not to devise more effective school curricula or philosophize about the teaching profession—rather, we are using these principles for ourselves, to become better teachers and facilitators in any learning endeavor.
Speaker:We can take the most obvious and powerful lesson from this theory: that learning, when it occurs naturally, is incremental and happens in small units that build on one another.
Speaker:Also, if we hope to teach to our best abilities, we need to find ways to mirror this natural learning process and support it in the people we’re attempting to teach.
Speaker:This means paying close attention to cognitive load—does your student have enough stored knowledge to draw on?
Speaker:Are you presenting too many things at once?
Speaker:How are you pacing the delivery of information, and is this overwhelming or gently challenging your student?
Speaker:A related way of thinking about human learning is called the information processing model, where the brain is seen as a kind of computer.
Speaker:It begins with sensing and perceiving information, where we determine whether it’s worth paying attention to.
Speaker:Then, we hold this information chunk in our short-term or working memory for a few seconds but, unless we commit it to long-term memory somehow, it more or less disappears.
Speaker:The next step, if it happens, is the information is encoded and filed away in long-term memory in a mental schema, along with any cues to help with retrieval later on.
Speaker:The next step would then be retrieval, which is often triggered by a specific environment.
Speaker:So how can we use this to become better teachers?
Speaker:Let’s look at it through an example.
Speaker:Say you want to teach a group of people the benefits of using a certain product.
Speaker:First, you’ll need to find ways to help this group retain the information in their sensory memory.
Speaker:As the name suggests, you do this by appealing to various senses, of which the most important are sight and hearing.
Speaker:To do this, show them the product and distribute some around so the group can touch and feel it.
Speaker:You should also explain the benefits of using it orally through words, as well as visually through infographics and other materials.
Speaker:Different people learn better when emphasis is placed on different senses.
Speaker:Using hearing, or words, will help some learn better, whereas others will respond to being able to feel the product in their hands.
Speaker:Then, we need to ensure that sensory memory converts to short-term memory.
Speaker:Factors that influence this transfer are the amount of information that needs to be processed, the level of attention from the student, and individual cognitive abilities.
Speaker:Thus, if you can make the earlier step as interesting as possible to engage and gain the attention of your students, you’ll activate their senses and help transfer their learning to short-term memory.
Speaker:The final step is to take this information and commit it to their long-term memory.
Speaker:This can be tricky, but repetition is key.
Speaker:Find novel ways to say the same thing so that you can drill the most important bits into the minds of your students.
Speaker:Keep the information you’re providing focused and break everything into small, digestible parts.
Speaker:Connect it to a real-life purpose.
Speaker:So, if you want them to sell the product, emphasize which benefits are most popular.
Speaker:If you want them to start using it, emphasize common problems and how the product will help solve them.
Speaker:All of this will help them retain the information in their long-term memory, ensuring they won’t forget it for a long time to come.
Speaker:Teaching tips from the cognitive load theory and the information processing model
Speaker:203 00:25:18,800 --> 00:25:25,600 Knowing about the brain’s “architecture” and its procedural processes, we can optimize learning.
Speaker:According to John Sweller, we can process a maximum of two or three pieces of new information in our working memory at any one moment, and hold this focus for around twenty seconds.
Speaker:When we transfer something from working to long-term memory, we can be said to have learnt it.
Speaker:So, take your time.
Speaker:Break information into chunks and feed them into long-term memory slowly and steadily.
Speaker:Be explicit and detailed in your explanation.
Speaker:Provide plenty of examples, and link as many concepts as possible to those your student already possesses, so as to anchor them.
Speaker:Other tips include taking a short break every ten or fifteen minutes, since attention often flags anyway.
Speaker:You could switch activities rather than stopping learning entirely.
Speaker:Just keep things fresh and moving.
Speaker:The goal is to keep your student engaged and active.
Speaker:Encourage conversation with questions and prompts (recall the inquiry-based approach), and mix things up.
Speaker:Since time and attention are limited, guide the process by showing your student what’s most important and what they should focus most on.
Speaker:Draw on long-term memory by connecting new material to old, contextualizing, inviting deeper thinking about the topic or looking at case studies, examples or problems.
Speaker:To lighten cognitive load, keep things simple and well organized.
Speaker:For example, devise an hour’s lesson around four fifteen-minute chunks, each with an opportunity to create a simple mind map that summarizes the points learnt.
Speaker:Spend lots of time drilling and reviewing—the more you keep thinking about a particular point, the more chance it has of getting encoded into long-term memory.
Speaker:Finally, get your student involved in these lesson plans or deliberations—explain how you’re organizing concepts and mapping out ideas.
Speaker:Let them see the relationship between each of the concepts they’re learning, and how it all fits together.
Speaker:Remember, the brain loves connections: the more meaningful connections you can draw between chunks of information, the better the brain will be able to file and retrieve that information later.
Scaffolding:the Power of Baby Steps
Scaffolding:225 00:27:37,120 --> 00:27:44,440 Being a good teacher is all about understanding how people naturally absorb, retain and use new information.
Scaffolding:If you think about any skill or knowledge you currently have, chances are you learnt it gradually, one step at a time.
Scaffolding:Experts always start out as novices, and the path from one to the other is filled with incremental changes rather than giant leaps.
Scaffolding:The fancy name for this process of ramping up mastery from lower levels of capacity is called scaffolding, since it refers to the careful building of a complex mental structure with smaller, simpler units.
Scaffolding:The great thing about learning how to use scaffolding, as either a teacher or a student, is that it’s a truly transferable skill—it’s hard to imagine any domain in life where it isn’t applicable.
Scaffolding:Your overall goal as a teacher using the technique of scaffolding is to simplify.
Scaffolding:As we’ve seen, this reduces cognitive load because all the brain has to manage in working memory is a small chunk of information.
Scaffolding:Once this is banked in long-term memory, the next step, level or unit can be considered.
Scaffolding:Depending on your student and what you’re attempting to teach them, your scaffolding process can vary in complexity.
Scaffolding:For example, you might follow a series of graded stages to teach them how to use a piece of software they’re unfamiliar with.
Scaffolding:Building a scaffold is like providing mental support and structure as the person builds up to the bigger goal: understanding how to use the entire program effectively.
Scaffolding:You might start with provision of knowledge: you could give some explanations and instructions for the program, what it’s used for, and a general introduction to the basic principles.
Scaffolding:You could then move on to a demonstration of strategies: you might run through a few operations on the program, showing students exactly what to do to achieve certain outcomes, as they watch you.
Scaffolding:You could extend this to modeling: this is where you construct a model encompassing the information you’ve shared, or show how the previous strategies fit together.
Scaffolding:Next you could move to questioning: you might ask them to guess how to do another related operation, given what you’ve already shown them.
Scaffolding:Your demonstration might naturally prompt a question—what do we do if we want to perform a slightly different operation?
Scaffolding:Can we still use the same technique?
Scaffolding:This could be your cue to move on to showing them another, more complex strategy—providing they thoroughly understand the first one.
Scaffolding:You could constantly make use of instructing as you go: tell your student, “you click here to do XYZ” or “this is how you import a file.”
Scaffolding:245 00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:51,120 Throughout, you can offer feedback and correction: Ask a question, see how your student responds, and infer where their level of understanding is.
Scaffolding:Gently and positively offer corrections, backtracking to previous instructions or simpler concepts to check understanding.
Scaffolding:You might use general feedback like, “It’s quicker to use a keyboard shortcut for that” or “you might want to try a different setting there.”
Scaffolding:249 00:30:04,680 --> 00:30:20,880 Finally, you can make use of restructuring the task as you go: set your student mini-tasks to complete before tackling something more complicated, or deliberately ignore some aspects of the program you’re teaching so you can make a particular point more clearly.
Scaffolding:You might show them how not to do something just so they understand why it doesn’t work.
Scaffolding:For example, deliberately use the program incorrectly and let them see how it becomes unusable or crashes.
Scaffolding:If all these steps sound complicated, they don’t have to be—scaffolding can be subtle and spontaneous without losing its effectiveness.
Scaffolding:It might be as simple as reminding a child to slow down, read through the sentence again and sound out difficult words if necessary.
Scaffolding:Encourage your student to look at the simplest chunks first, and once they’ve mastered those, draw their attention to the connections between them using questions, prompts and clues.
Scaffolding:The best teachers are able to help a student arrive at the next level of complexity on their own—the best “lesson plan” is where the students themselves are eager to move onto the next step!
Scaffolding:Another way to think about scaffolding is to imagine that it’s a gradual process of “handing over” to the student—you slowly progress from teacher-centered to student-centered.
Scaffolding:This approach has been called “I do, we do, you do” or sometimes “show me, help me, let me.” Let’s look at each of the three steps using a simple example of teaching someone how to bake a tricky French souffle.
Scaffolding:Teacher-led instruction, or “I do”
Scaffolding:260 00:31:40,760 --> 00:31:46,080 You tell your student to watch you carefully as you prepare the recipe, so they can see how it’s done.
Scaffolding:As you do so, you give some instruction and direction, actively sharing knowledge which they passively receive.
Scaffolding:You want to cover all the new concepts, skills and information, for example, “I’m using a metal bowl, see?
Scaffolding:Metal bowls get squeaky clean and you don’t want even the tiniest residue of any oil in there, or it will spoil your egg whites and they won’t get to this stiff-peak stage.”
Scaffolding:265 00:32:04,000 --> 00:32:13,240 At this stage, you are making sure your student is oriented to new material, and knows what the purpose of the lesson is (in this case, watch closely so you can do the same!).
Scaffolding:You want to clearly set limitations and goals, i.e.
Scaffolding:today we are making a perfect souffle.
Scaffolding:Draw on any previous knowledge, give meaningful and relevant explanations, and even examples.
Scaffolding:Teacher and student cooperation, or “we do”
Scaffolding:271 00:32:28,600 --> 00:32:33,480 This is the part where you use “training wheels” and gradually ramp up your student’s participation.
Scaffolding:You are still giving instruction, but it’s now directed toward guiding their action.
Scaffolding:You could supervise them making a souffle using what you’ve taught them, although you’re still there, doing some of the work, and prompting and correcting as you go.
Scaffolding:It’s about providing an opportunity to practice a new skill or retrieve some stored information, but with a little support—psychological and cognitive.
Scaffolding:Go one step at a time (remembering that sequences typically lower cognitive load) and use questions and prompts to lead the student to the next step.
Scaffolding:“OK, so now it’s time to put it in the oven… Do you remember where in the oven it goes and why?” Encourage your student to demonstrate their understanding or skill in a limited way at first—a little encouragement and positive feedback is always appreciated!
Scaffolding:Mistakes are a part of the process, and will allow you to stop, adjust and reinforce the correct way.
Scaffolding:Student-led practice, or “you do”
Scaffolding:280 00:33:27,680 --> 00:33:34,560 The ultimate goal is for your student to be able to perform the skill or retrieve the information on their own, without you.
Scaffolding:At some point, the training wheels come off.
Scaffolding:After some time you might ask your student to prepare a perfect souffle for you from scratch, without your supervision.
Scaffolding:This gives them the chance to independently demonstrate their progress, and compare this against the goals you both set in the beginning.
Scaffolding:Obviously, if your student produces what looks like a deflated hockey puck that was recently on fire, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and build better scaffolding!
Scaffolding:Takeaways
Scaffolding:287 00:34:04,560 --> 00:34:17,040 • We can draw on the five most common pedagogical approaches to become better teachers, whether that’s inside the classroom or in more informal contexts.
Scaffolding:• The constructivist approach is about building up knowledge and skill from information that is already known to the student.
Scaffolding:You help them “construct” new knowledge by relating everything to this set of existing knowledge in order to connect two different concepts.
Scaffolding:• The integrative approach focuses on making lessons practical and applicable in the real world.
Scaffolding:The more relevant and contextual new information is, the more likely students are to retain it.
Scaffolding:• The collaborative approach uses the strengths of group collaboration between students to support learning.
Scaffolding:You rely on students within the group to teach each other by exposing them to unique viewpoints and knowledge that everyone has.
Scaffolding:• The inquiry-based approach is about directing learning by asking the student to devise a question, a method for arriving at an answer, the answer, or some combination of these three.
Scaffolding:• The reflective approach is about tailoring the teaching methods used to best fit the student in front of you, regularly taking time to appraise what works and what doesn’t.
Scaffolding:• The brain is not a machine.
Scaffolding:Cognitive load theory tells us that as the brain’s power is limited, we need to think strategically and reduce load while maximizing learning.
Scaffolding:This can be done in a variety of ways that respect rather than push against the brain’s natural learning processes.
Scaffolding:Some strategies involve keeping your material focused on particular topics, repeating information as much as you can, and appealing to the senses in ways that pique attention.
Scaffolding:• Scaffolding is the principle of making small, incremental improvements and building bigger concepts or skills from smaller, simpler ones.
Scaffolding:This can be summarized as “I do, we do, you do” to show how the teacher gradually hands over control and mastery to the student.
Scaffolding:Today we explore key insights from this chapter in Peter Holland's book on covering lessons about resilience, growth, and determination.
Scaffolding:Here are the takeaways from today's episode.
Scaffolding:We can draw on the five most common pedagogical approaches to become better teachers, whether that's inside the classroom or in more informal contexts.
Scaffolding:The constructivist approach is about building up knowledge and skill from information that is already known to the student.
Scaffolding:You help them construct new knowledge by relating everything to this set of existing knowledge in order to connect two different concepts.
Scaffolding:The integrative approach focuses on making lessons practical and applicable in the real world.
Scaffolding:The more relevant and contextual new information is, the more likely students are to retain it.
Scaffolding:The collaborative approach uses the strengths of group collaboration between students to support learning.
Scaffolding:You rely on students within the group to teach each other by exposing them to unique viewpoints and knowledge that everyone has.
Scaffolding:The inquiry-based approach is about directing learning by asking the students to devise a question, a method for arriving at an answer, the answer, or some combination of these three.
Scaffolding:The reflective approach is about tailoring the teaching methods used to best fit the student in front of you, regularly taking time to appraise what works and what doesn't.
Scaffolding:The brain's not a machine.
Scaffolding:Cognitive load theory tells us that as the brain's power is limited, we need to think strategically and reduce load while maximizing learning.
Scaffolding:This can be done in a variety of ways that respect rather than push against the brain's natural learning processes.
Scaffolding:Some strategies involve keeping your material focused on particular topics, repeating information as much as you can, and appealing to the senses in ways that pique attention.
Scaffolding:Learning is the principle of making small, incremental improvements and building bigger concepts or skills from smaller, simpler ones.
Scaffolding:This can be summarized as, I do, we do, you do, to show how the teacher gradually hands over control and mastery to the student.
Scaffolding:And as we close out the episode, we'll leave you with this from Nelson Mandela.
Scaffolding:Do not judge me by my successes.
Scaffolding:Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up.
