The Scaffolding of Learning

Some of the students I have taught have now reached college-going age. When they were in secondary school, they invested in something I told them to : Suspension of their beliefs about learning. Up until that point, the only thing schooling had taught them was about Competition and Rote-Learning. Now that some are in college, they are surprised that so many other people are so clueless about how learning happens and feel grateful for the headstart they had.

I also have a few students who only came AFTER they realized they're not doing so well in college. Most of the time, it's a bit too late for me to lay the foundation for them because Time stands still for no Man. While their learning with me is progressing, so are the dates of their term exams and due dates of assignments.

The most significant difference between my pre-college students who went to college and the students that come once college is well underway is their ability to learn and handle learning. I will talk about the second group.

Those who come only after they find themselves struggling to stay afloat do not have the ability to 'capture' lectures and the point of their lecturers and assignment. Because of this inability to see where the lecturer is going, they take in learning as piecemeals instead of a continuous series of scaffolding leading up to a major learning point. I have a student who is completely clueless about his Economics assignment. Thankfully, I have students with the highest moral standards. They never ask that I help them, just explain the assignment to them.

But here's the problem : Assignments are based upon anywhere between 80-100 hours of lectures and tutorials. How do I explain the connections and implications one has to demonstrate, in one hour or less? Since they have no concept of the lessons leading to this assignment, I would actually need to re-teach the same content their lecturer did. Of course that's impossible. I might as well get paid as the Marketing/Economics/Sociology/PR/IT lecturer if I have to explain from the start in order for them to have an understanding of what to produce in the end. If a student does not have the pre-requisites lecturers in college take for granted, they cannot build new information and knowledge upon the things lecturers are delivering because they LACK THE SCAFFOLDING that is necessary for learning. Without context and assimilation, the lecturer's words are just droning in their ears.

The responses of those who did not have the 'setting' in the learning department of their brain differs greatly from the other students who were prepped during secondary school. One particular student who had to start from zero attempted to do Law. Within 2 weeks of attending HELP, she's calling home looking for HELP. Lucky for her, her established relationship with me and my style of teaching provided her with a default setting to suspend all previous beliefs. She had also already adopted the principle of critical thinking and taking responsibility to connect the world outside to classroom learning. Now all she had left to do was to learn how to see The End in Mind for a UK Law Degree and then absorb from lectures,information that can be correlated and built upon the scaffolding of critical thinking and learner responsibility to make connections. The taking of responsibility also made her receptive to the idea of paying more to access quality lecturers instead of paying the cheapest amount to get a degree. By having access to dedicated and committed lecturers, she could, with her sense of responsibility for learning, approach them before and after lectures, not with asking them for answers, but to pitch some of her ideas to them so that they can give her clues about whether she's headed in the right direction.
She is now in her final year in UK and is doing so far, so good.

The only thing the students I teach have in common is that they are from non-English speaking, Chinese families. Up until the point they met me, they did not read in English nor had any interest in taking responsibility for their learning since they come from a schooling philosophy that emphasises little more than rote learning and 'obedience'. Challenging them to think beyond short-term solutions was difficult. But once they hit college, the difference between those who had built their scaffolding and those who did not, became obvious.

This scaffolding is built upon the principle that you must first know a little bit of everything so you can append new bits of something else to the little bit you already have. And then.......if you read my previous blog, you simply let is snowball. There are a few other side-dishes that can go along to navigate the speed and direction of your learning, depending on how easy or tough the course/college you're attending. A SeGi college in-house diploma in some ambiguous programme is not the same thing as an LLB from Leeds.

Those side-dishes include having an end in mind for everything from course overview, exam/assignment objectives, lecturer profile, time-management, pre and post lecture skills (reading, listening, note-taking, bite-sized revision, automatic appending of new to old information, continuous construction of scaffolding, etc). A student who knows this doesn't "wait to die" but waltzes with the dynamics of learning. One student, who had a lecturer that does little more than read off a textbook, asked me, "Wah, Master's degree so easy to get? The lecturer can't even expand or explain a question I asked." Another student sits in a lecture where all she does is count the number of times the lecturer makes mistakes in pronunciation or facts. But instead of complaining or panicking, they use this observation to take PROACTIVE ACTION and prepare themselves in other ways for the END IN MIND. So, they do well in the subject despite the fact that they got a lousy lecturer because they could 'read a lecturer profile' and match their style and available resources to achieve the results they want. And if and when they fail a subject due to a great lack of desire to pass, they don't drop out. They simply re-take the exam after asking for an appointment with the lecturer to go through the points of their failure. They then take responsibility for their failure and, coupled with the experience they had had taking the subject before, they re-align their desire and mission to pass and get it over with.

People often take for granted that successful students 'simply know the right answers and the right thing to do.' Given, there are some students who instinctively know how to do well and I have a couple of straight-A1 students who demonstrate that in-born drive. But for many others, they must be made aware that there are things that have to be learned, things that have to reach a certain point before other things appear to happen almost automatically. That is what is meant by the scaffolding of learning. People often don't make connections between one thing to another, between what's happenig inside the classroom and outside.

And by the time they need help, it can be a bit too late. The preparation for learning was supposed to happen during those 11 years taxpayers pay money to finance.....

Saying this reminds me of what I told a MUET student about how to prepare with the end in mind. I asked, "What's the purpose of MUET?". She said, "to improve our English for university." And what if you don't get a good band? "I have to take another subject, a foundation in English course." So I told her, MUET is not about entering university then, is it? Further probing into it made her realize that MUET is meant to reduce the liability of lecturers in local U-s who teach subjects in English. Students who are not readers cannot also think and process critically nor are goal-oriented. And because they lack the confidence and direction necessary to steer an undergraduate study, they become a liability to lecturers' passing percentage. Lecturers will have no choice but to keep lowering passing marks in order to maintain a university's population. And this causes the of unemployable graduates in the market; undergrads that received their scroll based on the lowest denomination of learning.

The end game of MUET is really, to have more proactive undergraduates who then go on to become employable grads. But how can MUET serve this need when students are still anchored to the SAME mentality that caused them to require MUET to be implemented in the first place? And that is the exam-taking mentality, the 'give me the right answer, give me an essay to memorize.'Again, students approach MUET the way they approach UPSR, PMR, SPM. I often get VERY depressed teaching and what I do is to keep raising my fees until people no longer want to pay me to prepare them for a myopic goal.

The students who opt out of local U-s seem to have a better mentality than those who seek the safety net of getting into a state-funded university. I have seen instances where an STPM student CHOSE not to enter public university once their mindset shifted. They then go on to take control of their learning, and their life. Those who still choose local U-s rather than change their mindset tend to become the sort of uncompetitive undergraduates we hear so much about in the papers. This is not to say that ALL local undergrads are of low quality, but only to illustrate that state-funded universities are attractive only to people with a certain mindset. There are, of course, local grads who go against the grain and these are the ones that usually get expelled or arrested for 'student activism'. I think you catch my drift.

Let us not think that achieving VALUEABLE KNOWLEDGE is a clear-cut, pigeon-holed,mechanical practice. It is a long and invisible process that begins during secondary school. If for any reason, that invisible process of learning, the scaffolding, did not happen, or got truncated before undergrad studies took place, there is little damage control that can be done later on.