Scaffold Like a MoFo
How meeting students in their Zone of Proximal Development transforms output anxiety into real growth.
I just wrote about the importance of EF in reading and positioned summer as a time to bolster the thinking muscles around reading. This week I want to explore another idea that supports “thinking muscles” with another academic scenario: resilience. But not in the way you are thinking. I am not a huge fan of grit. It comes off as presumptuous and denies a whole lot of the EF work needed to build it. Kids with grit learned it through extremely skilled mentorship. So today’s blog is about how we grow resilience and why it is hard.
Let’s start with why so many kids appear not to have this thing we call grit. First, grit is all about tangible output. Because to output when things are challenging you need resilience to stay in the work.
I have written about this before: we love output in classrooms because it gives us something concrete to assess. But for many students, output is off putting. It requires too much of the system, overwhelms it, and then those students are blamed for not having tenacity.
I recently began working with two highly inquisitive and thoughtful high school students. Both might seem like mediocre students from the outside. When faced with the wall of awful (coined by Brendan Mahan to describe the barrier that prevents individuals from starting challenging tasks), both of these students tend to avoid the work. Procrastination takes over, and missed assignments pile up, leaving them with average grades that don’t reflect their intellect or curiosity.
So while these students are both really fun to chat with about anything from philosophy to science fiction, they struggle to produce. But I know they will once they actually get the message that they are valuable and worthy and that the things they produce will be handled with care.
How do I get these students to stick with their work and start to get results. First, I don’t ask for a lot of output. I tend to make things conversational to build trust. I praise their ideas and share in them. We talk like equals and when I do ask for something written, I respond to their effort. I model care in how I read their work, how I reflect their ideas back to them, how I listen more than I correct. Over time, they begin to believe it: that their thoughts are worth something, that risk won't be punished, and that their work won’t be torn apart the moment it’s shared.
As adults, we forget how vulnerable students feel all day. Unless you are someone who faces criticism daily, it can be hard to remember how awful feedback feels. No one wants to do their best work and have it marked up with revisions even when it needs to be. While we may need feedback, we don’t want it and it takes a tremendous amount of emotional control to look at the red wall of edits and say, “Yep, this is worth the effort. Nope, these revisions are not a sign of my total inadequacy at the venture I am undertaking.”
Few of us can actually do this kind of reflection with grace, let alone do it at all. Feedback makes us all pretty cranky. So, let’s be real, of course, many kids and teens cannot overcome that fear of failure that precedes success. They are still young. They need time. But how do we help teens and kids get over the wall of awful?
We’ve known the answer for ages, thanks to Vygotsky: meet students in the Zone of Proximal Development. And then? Scaffold like a MoFo until they’re ready.
Next week, I’ll show you how I scaffold like a MoFo for SAT prep and why it works.