A persistent challenge in my teaching practice is navigating the line between what I know and what my learners know and gauging which of my disciplinary knowledge and skills have a complexity I take for granted. As experts in our fields, it can be difficult for us to stay mindful of just how complex basic disciplinary concepts can be for our learners. 

In this blog post, I want to share two experiences: one recent and one from my past. These two experiences have me thinking about ways I can break down complex skills into simpler, component skills to practice and combine for my students. 

Voluntary Release 

About two months ago, my wife and I’s new baby started learning to drop things. Here’s how it would go—  

First, she would look at the toy, consider it, and pick it up off the floor. Next, she would raise it above her head, arm outstretched, and… pause. A beat would pass while she held the toy aloft, and then she would either: (1) slam the toy and her fist down on the floor; (2) give her arm a little jerk that caused the toy to slip from her fingers; or (3) manage to open her hand to drop the toy. 

When we drop something, it’s easy to think of it as one action, but it’s more like three or four actions: picking up the object, lifting it, possibly positioning it, and opening the hand to release it.  

As she began acquiring this skill, our baby had most of those actions figured out, but at some point, she got hung up at the end when she had to open her hand to release the object. 

This action is actually a specific skill babies acquire around the age of 8-9 months called “voluntary release,” and it’s crucial for learning how to engage with the world around them.  

Suddenly becoming aware of how secretly complex dropping something is and watching my daughter break it down into component skills to master and eventually combine, I had a moment of recognition as it called to mind my university students. 

The First-year Composition Classroom 

The first semester I taught on my own in the university setting, I relied on teaching materials gifted to me by my mentor professor. Among these materials were lessons for scaffolding teaching analysis to students. At the time, I wasn’t sure how necessary these were. Did I really need to hold my students’ hands through it? 

Fast-forward to mid-semester and the beginning of our rhetorical analysis unit. Standing in front of my class, I pulled up an image of an advertisement on the screen. 

“Okay,” I said, “let’s just do a basic analysis to get our feet wet. What’s some things going on in this image?” 

Around the classroom: blank looks, awkward shifting, fidgeting with pencils and phones. 

A student raised their hand. “Like, the theme?” 

That was the moment I realized there was a disconnect. To me, analysis was a relatively basic skill—the kind of thing that is a one-step process. For my students, it was fully unfamiliar, and the closest thing they could approximate to it was “finding the theme.” We muscled our way through the rest of the lesson that day, and before prepping for our next meeting, I returned to the original materials from my mentor professor. 

A footnote: It’s worth noting that this was long before I learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy and its depiction of how skills build upon one another with analysis falling between identification (the most basic) and creation (the most complex).   

Scaffolding Learning 

When we reconvened at our next class, we tried analysis again but, this time, with the scaffolded supports provided by my mentor. 

I pulled the same image up on the projector, and instead of jumping right into analysis, we focused on simply “inventorying” what we saw. I created a list of the things on the whiteboard that learners saw in the image: the figures, the shapes, the words, the colors, the fonts, the size of the fonts, and more. Nothing was off-limits. If it was in the image, students shouted it out and I added it to the list. 

Once we compiled everything my students saw, we discussed what those things were doing in the image, helping us to come to a rudimentary analysis of the advertisement. 

While this scaffolded approach was definitely an improvement to just leaping into analysis, it was still challenging for my students and difficult for me to facilitate. Over the years, I’ve refined the process and now use the metaphor of an engine to help scaffold and structure the learning. 

First, we determine the purpose of the “engine” in front of us. What is this advertisement trying to persuade us to do, for example? Is this ad supposed to convince us to buy blue jeans? Save our money at a particular bank? Attend a specific university? 

Then, we identify the component parts of the “engine.” In the same way an engine is made of individual belts, filters, and gears working together, an advertisement is made of individual images, words, and graphic design techniques. 

Once we work through these two steps, we start connecting them, discussing the ways the component parts we’ve identified help the “engine” in question successfully (or unsuccessfully) fulfill its purpose. For example, if the advertisement’s purpose is to persuade us to buy blue jeans, how does this particular font help it do that? 

In scaffolding analysis in this way, I broke down what I was accustomed to doing all at once into smaller, manageable steps: (1) identify rhetorical purpose, (2) inventory elements, and (3) analyze how the components affected the rhetoric. Breaking up and slowing down this process helped my students learn and practice each part of it so that they, eventually, could do it quickly and seamlessly on their own. 

Conclusion: Slow Down and Scaffold 

Obviously, our students benefit from being taught by subject matter experts, but our expertise doesn’t count for much if we aren’t able to foster deep, meaningful learning in scaffolded ways.  

Humans are learning creatures, and we do that by practicing and mastering skills that compound and build upon one another. Watching my daughter learn to drop things, I was reminded of that fact and the fact that that kind of learning happens at all ages and levels of experience. 

The first time I taught rhetorical analysis, I learned that it was too complex a skill to learn all at once, and it needed to be broken down into its individual skills to master and then combine. Forcing myself to slow down and really think about the step-by-step process needed for this learning activity, I was able to help my students break the skill down and scaffold their learning, giving them the foothold they needed. 

What kinds of complex or discipline-specific skills do you often see learners wrestle with? How might those skills be broken down and scaffolded to support students?