I worked in engineering for more than 40 years, and almost everything we did was driven by a schedule. The customer needs project X completed by a given date, so the first thing we did was break that X down into its components (define input values, do calculations A, B, and C; write reports x, y, and z; etc. etc.). The schedule laid these all out, with links (A has to be done before I can do report y...). Simple projects have simple schedules and complicated projects have complicated schedules. All of this was completely foreign to me as a new hire. But that's how we got things done on time, and *that's* how we got the customer to give us future work.
Maybe the first sub-assignment is to have the students prepare their own schedule. At least a calendar showing the due dates for each of their courses, as far as they can be known. Then try to fill in the intermediate tasks. Few freshmen would be able to do this, but by third year I'd think they could at least take a stab at it.
Sometimes the metaphors you use trap your thinking, and refitting a new metaphor can offer new solutions. Scaffolding are semi-permanent structures used in construction. What your students need instead are training wheels, which are only meant to be used until riders can balance on their own. For example, instead of having staff create intermediate deadlines and assigning them to students, why not consider giving them a project management template they can reuse? It's hard to ignore your project turning danger red because you have to do a 36-hour task and only have 48 hours left...
Reading this - as someone who's mostly been a student, on the occasions I've taught I wasn't in charge of developing the curriculum at all, so take this as a layman's thoughts - I'm reminded of one class in particular that I took in law school that still stands out to me years later as being incredibly effective in helping me understand the material.
I'll preface it by saying that I took this class when I was in my 30's and it was a subject I was incredibly interested in, so I was both more mature than most undergraduates and very inclined to be engaged with the material. So maybe this wouldn't work with students who are just taking a class to fulfill a requirement, and maybe this strategy was actually used in my undergrad classes and I was just too young and dumb to understand what was trying to be conveyed to me.
Anyway, one thing I definitely remember from practically every other class I've taken is that it felt like I never understood what I was supposed to be learning and why I was learning it. For example, when I took differential equations (sidebar: I don't think I ever successfully solved a differential equation, and gratefully exited with a Gentleman's C based on the fact that I did try real hard), we would start learning a new technique or a new type of something-or-another and I might not even realize we'd moved on to something new or what the significance of it was until we were a way into it. There was structure, but I wasn't really aware of it.
As an analogy, consider traveling to a new location by car. if you are the driver, you at least have some idea how you got there because you were following the map or the directions or whatever - you knew there was a plan to get from point A to point B to point C before you started and your guide - be it GPS or a paper map for us olds - walked you through the process step by step after showing you where you were going. But as the passenger, you were just along for the ride, and even though you might have been paying attention to where you were going, you probably couldn't really tell someone how you got there or why you took the route you took. If you had to drive there later yourself, it would almost be as if you'd never been there before because you didn't have the benefit of following the map the first time you'd been there.
Okay, finally, to the point: When I was taking Patent Law in law school, we had a visiting professor who I thought was one of the two best teachers I ever had. Now, keep in mind that in law school classes, the normal way of taking notes is to develop an outline by following the professor's lectures and taking notes / creating the outline as you go. There was a syllabus and everything, but you kinda had to pick up on your own when you'd finished an moved on to another topic, and sort of guess how far back up in your outline level you were going to start taking your notes when the subject changed. Is this a whole new major topic? Is this another variation on the thing you were just talking about? How does this fit into the overall structure of this outline I'm making? Is this a "II"? Is it a "C"? Is it a "iii"? Where does this piece fit in?
So, what this professor did that was so helpful - she would start each section by putting up on the screen or whiteboard or whatever the outline that we were going to be developing at the start of each lecture. Back to the car analogy - instead of making us try to figure out where we were going by making notes of the landmarks we passed, she walked us through the map at the beginning of each part of the journey and had us write down the things we were going to be passing on the way, and then through the course of the lecture we would add details to our own outlines the clarify what we were seeing/hearing. ("Okay, there's the big box store that we are going to see when we make this next turn - ah, it's a Costco, better write that down for next time.") So instead of guessing where we were going and trying to figure out the map while we were also supposed to be absorbing the details, we already knew where we were going and how this particular thing fit into the structure, even if we hadn't seen what was coming up next - we knew we weren't there yet, and when we got to the next thing, we could say, "Okay, now we're on the third of the five things that we're going to be covering. Got it." When we got to the end of that particular topic, we knew that we'd finished covering it, and what was coming next was a new topic entirely and not a continuation of whatever we were just talking about.
You professionals are probably saying, "Hey dumbass, we already have that. That's what the syllabus is!" And you're right. But I can tell you as a student, I can't recall another class where we did anything more than quickly go over the syllabus at the very beginning of the class (and at that point the only part of it was paying attention to was when the tests were going to be and how much homework I'd just signed myself up for), and then it was never mentioned again. It wasn't until *maybe* at the end of the class that I might run across it again and say, "Ohhhh yeah, those are all the topics we covered, how about that." There was structure, but I was too deep in the weeds and trying to keep my head above water (apologies for the mixed metaphors) to really see it.
So, maybe, it might be helpful in teaching your classes to be very explicit about how you were working your way through the outline (syllabus) of the class as you're progressing through the semester. It wasn't something that took a lot of time - when we started something new, the professor would put up the outline of what we were about to cover, and then she could just point out where we were in it when we were moving to the next point. If we stopped in the middle of it during one lecture, we'd start the next one by putting the outline for that chapter or whatever back up on the screen and saying, "Okay, last time we met, we were right here. Let's keep talking about that" or "Okay, last time we finished up talking about this right here. Now we're moving on to this next topic here, which is..."
Anyway, just some random rambling from the other side of the podium.
You write "This used to work reasonably well, but the last couple of times out it’s been a dismal failure." Do you have any thoughts on what's changed?
It's tough to say, since the number of students we deal with is very small. We can see large swings in class dynamics just from random fluctuations because of statistics.
I think it's largely a matter of student expectations, though. Ten or fifteen years ago they would've hit less-structured courses before getting to this lab, and so had already gone through the shock of dealing with that. Now, the lab is the first time they're really turned loose.
I should probably also note that the independent-work model was never universally successful-- as a department we very rarely give F grades for reasons other than cheating, and that course has been responsible for most of them thanks to students who couldn't manage their time. But it used to be maybe one or two students handing things in way past the deadline, and more recently it's half the class or more.
I'll chip in from the high school side- we no longer have deadlines for work. At the high school level, it is now routine to accept work from students 5 weeks or more late. This is driven by a) the need to reduce the failure rate by any means possible and b) the student perspective that the purpose of school is to turn in completed assignments for grading, rather than do work and practice in order to learn a skill. The job has become transactional- sitting in class is something we do to get a diploma. Most of this change was driven by covid, when grace became the norm.
Never-ending scaffolding is a real problem. My thinking is always to include the removal of the scaffolding in the plan, to sort of scaffold the transition away from scaffolded tasks, by trying to push successive tasks to be as independent as possible (to keep the self-direction within the ZPD in education terminology). This is tough when you're coordinating across multiple courses and years of study for individual students, but I think you're right that it's important for people to learn to work more independently.
On a practical note for the course you're talking about, maybe scaffolding could look like requiring the students to make (and follow) their own schedule so they don't end up waiting until the last minute? Planning how to use time effectively and setting a timeline for a research project is a necessary skill, just as much as knowing how to use a piece of lab equipment.
I think college courses are difficult because you have limited control of the order in which students take courses, however in this case I think the general answer is that each course needs to remove scaffolding from beginning to end. I.e. in your lab class first lab has a full timeline laid out and each successive lab removes scaffolding and as part of the instruction you explain what each peice of the scaffold was there for and why it is important students are able to do it themselves. Last lab maybe is as open as a more real world task but maybe give them an initial assignment of making their *own* scaffold/plan/schedule) which will also give time to give them feedback on their plan before you receive drivel :-)
Personally, I feel like the scaffolding is just a way for us in the lower levels of high school and middle school to maintain some sense of integrity while keeping the pass rate at ~100%. These days, unless I completely scaffold every single step of the assignment (as in, tell the kid they need to divide here, multiply here...), I will get shrugs and incompletes. Doing a lab like rolling a cart down a ramp takes ~3 hours of class time. I can't send homework home because kids simply don't do it when I do. Any time I try to disengage the training wheels, kids lock up or simply start asking me to show them how to do the work. The last time I took away the training wheels, my failure rate spikes to about 60% of students. With the training wheels, it's still a struggle to get the fail rate below 20%, and I have to do a lot of small group work. Not to mention that we have trained kids to feel that every single deadline is infinitely negotiable. I have kids turning in copied work 5 weeks late today, expecting a grade because they simply turned something in. And you know what? I'm taking the papers, because I have to.
So yeah, we do them no favors, and the durability that students need to build is getting left until later years. Colleges are now having to pick up the load. Saplings need the breeze to strengthen their trunks, and without strength they fall over and die from their own weight.
So I've increased scaffolding not in lower division classes but in upper-division and grad classes less to hold their hands than to help mitigate AI use. Sure, at each step in the process they could use AI, but as the parts become a whole it is harder for that to happen (at each stage the AI would have to be able to speak to itself to create a seamless whole). Meanwhile in the History survey my never moving away from blue books means that I am so out of fashion I am back in fashion. Neo-Ludditism for the win!
I think this discussion needs to be had in conjunction with the cost of failure. Let's say you do what some in the public seem to think should be done, simply provide no major scaffolding, and fail the students who can't hack it. As a steward of your profession, shouldn't you be weeding out the weaker students so that only the best, most capable continue on? What, after all, is the value of a degree if someone's hand is held the whole way by their professors? Aren't you watering down the quality by scaffolding? Just fail them, right?
It's not that I believe these things are necessarily the right path or that the assumptions underpinning them are true (e.g. that failing because of deadlines means you are intellectually incapable of the work) but that this line of thinking needs to be addressed. There are powerful pro-meritocratic (or at least they present it that way) forces who would like to see collegiate education become more exclusive and who do argue that kids up and down the educational ranks need to be failed more.
The key point of disagreement between these approaches has to do with whether the students who "can't hack it" are lacking some innate ability to do the work for the subject in question, or whether they're lacking some ancillary "soft skills" (time management, study skills, knowing about and taking advantage of available resources for extra help, etc.) that aren't directly related to the course material. If you believe the latter, then the correct approach is to add some supports to help them navigate the courses while they catch up on the ancillary skills. Done properly, this should actually strengthen the majors, by bringing in students who have the talents needed to be good but otherwise might've been "weeded out" for reasons that have little relation to the subject matter.
The problem I worry about is that if you don't do this right, you just sort of pass the issue of ancillary skill deficiencies on to the next course in the sequence. Which isn't actually helping anything or anyone to get better.
I worked in engineering for more than 40 years, and almost everything we did was driven by a schedule. The customer needs project X completed by a given date, so the first thing we did was break that X down into its components (define input values, do calculations A, B, and C; write reports x, y, and z; etc. etc.). The schedule laid these all out, with links (A has to be done before I can do report y...). Simple projects have simple schedules and complicated projects have complicated schedules. All of this was completely foreign to me as a new hire. But that's how we got things done on time, and *that's* how we got the customer to give us future work.
Maybe the first sub-assignment is to have the students prepare their own schedule. At least a calendar showing the due dates for each of their courses, as far as they can be known. Then try to fill in the intermediate tasks. Few freshmen would be able to do this, but by third year I'd think they could at least take a stab at it.
Sometimes the metaphors you use trap your thinking, and refitting a new metaphor can offer new solutions. Scaffolding are semi-permanent structures used in construction. What your students need instead are training wheels, which are only meant to be used until riders can balance on their own. For example, instead of having staff create intermediate deadlines and assigning them to students, why not consider giving them a project management template they can reuse? It's hard to ignore your project turning danger red because you have to do a 36-hour task and only have 48 hours left...
Hope that's helpful.
Cjf
Reading this - as someone who's mostly been a student, on the occasions I've taught I wasn't in charge of developing the curriculum at all, so take this as a layman's thoughts - I'm reminded of one class in particular that I took in law school that still stands out to me years later as being incredibly effective in helping me understand the material.
I'll preface it by saying that I took this class when I was in my 30's and it was a subject I was incredibly interested in, so I was both more mature than most undergraduates and very inclined to be engaged with the material. So maybe this wouldn't work with students who are just taking a class to fulfill a requirement, and maybe this strategy was actually used in my undergrad classes and I was just too young and dumb to understand what was trying to be conveyed to me.
Anyway, one thing I definitely remember from practically every other class I've taken is that it felt like I never understood what I was supposed to be learning and why I was learning it. For example, when I took differential equations (sidebar: I don't think I ever successfully solved a differential equation, and gratefully exited with a Gentleman's C based on the fact that I did try real hard), we would start learning a new technique or a new type of something-or-another and I might not even realize we'd moved on to something new or what the significance of it was until we were a way into it. There was structure, but I wasn't really aware of it.
As an analogy, consider traveling to a new location by car. if you are the driver, you at least have some idea how you got there because you were following the map or the directions or whatever - you knew there was a plan to get from point A to point B to point C before you started and your guide - be it GPS or a paper map for us olds - walked you through the process step by step after showing you where you were going. But as the passenger, you were just along for the ride, and even though you might have been paying attention to where you were going, you probably couldn't really tell someone how you got there or why you took the route you took. If you had to drive there later yourself, it would almost be as if you'd never been there before because you didn't have the benefit of following the map the first time you'd been there.
Okay, finally, to the point: When I was taking Patent Law in law school, we had a visiting professor who I thought was one of the two best teachers I ever had. Now, keep in mind that in law school classes, the normal way of taking notes is to develop an outline by following the professor's lectures and taking notes / creating the outline as you go. There was a syllabus and everything, but you kinda had to pick up on your own when you'd finished an moved on to another topic, and sort of guess how far back up in your outline level you were going to start taking your notes when the subject changed. Is this a whole new major topic? Is this another variation on the thing you were just talking about? How does this fit into the overall structure of this outline I'm making? Is this a "II"? Is it a "C"? Is it a "iii"? Where does this piece fit in?
So, what this professor did that was so helpful - she would start each section by putting up on the screen or whiteboard or whatever the outline that we were going to be developing at the start of each lecture. Back to the car analogy - instead of making us try to figure out where we were going by making notes of the landmarks we passed, she walked us through the map at the beginning of each part of the journey and had us write down the things we were going to be passing on the way, and then through the course of the lecture we would add details to our own outlines the clarify what we were seeing/hearing. ("Okay, there's the big box store that we are going to see when we make this next turn - ah, it's a Costco, better write that down for next time.") So instead of guessing where we were going and trying to figure out the map while we were also supposed to be absorbing the details, we already knew where we were going and how this particular thing fit into the structure, even if we hadn't seen what was coming up next - we knew we weren't there yet, and when we got to the next thing, we could say, "Okay, now we're on the third of the five things that we're going to be covering. Got it." When we got to the end of that particular topic, we knew that we'd finished covering it, and what was coming next was a new topic entirely and not a continuation of whatever we were just talking about.
You professionals are probably saying, "Hey dumbass, we already have that. That's what the syllabus is!" And you're right. But I can tell you as a student, I can't recall another class where we did anything more than quickly go over the syllabus at the very beginning of the class (and at that point the only part of it was paying attention to was when the tests were going to be and how much homework I'd just signed myself up for), and then it was never mentioned again. It wasn't until *maybe* at the end of the class that I might run across it again and say, "Ohhhh yeah, those are all the topics we covered, how about that." There was structure, but I was too deep in the weeds and trying to keep my head above water (apologies for the mixed metaphors) to really see it.
So, maybe, it might be helpful in teaching your classes to be very explicit about how you were working your way through the outline (syllabus) of the class as you're progressing through the semester. It wasn't something that took a lot of time - when we started something new, the professor would put up the outline of what we were about to cover, and then she could just point out where we were in it when we were moving to the next point. If we stopped in the middle of it during one lecture, we'd start the next one by putting the outline for that chapter or whatever back up on the screen and saying, "Okay, last time we met, we were right here. Let's keep talking about that" or "Okay, last time we finished up talking about this right here. Now we're moving on to this next topic here, which is..."
Anyway, just some random rambling from the other side of the podium.
You write "This used to work reasonably well, but the last couple of times out it’s been a dismal failure." Do you have any thoughts on what's changed?
It's tough to say, since the number of students we deal with is very small. We can see large swings in class dynamics just from random fluctuations because of statistics.
I think it's largely a matter of student expectations, though. Ten or fifteen years ago they would've hit less-structured courses before getting to this lab, and so had already gone through the shock of dealing with that. Now, the lab is the first time they're really turned loose.
I should probably also note that the independent-work model was never universally successful-- as a department we very rarely give F grades for reasons other than cheating, and that course has been responsible for most of them thanks to students who couldn't manage their time. But it used to be maybe one or two students handing things in way past the deadline, and more recently it's half the class or more.
I'll chip in from the high school side- we no longer have deadlines for work. At the high school level, it is now routine to accept work from students 5 weeks or more late. This is driven by a) the need to reduce the failure rate by any means possible and b) the student perspective that the purpose of school is to turn in completed assignments for grading, rather than do work and practice in order to learn a skill. The job has become transactional- sitting in class is something we do to get a diploma. Most of this change was driven by covid, when grace became the norm.
Never-ending scaffolding is a real problem. My thinking is always to include the removal of the scaffolding in the plan, to sort of scaffold the transition away from scaffolded tasks, by trying to push successive tasks to be as independent as possible (to keep the self-direction within the ZPD in education terminology). This is tough when you're coordinating across multiple courses and years of study for individual students, but I think you're right that it's important for people to learn to work more independently.
On a practical note for the course you're talking about, maybe scaffolding could look like requiring the students to make (and follow) their own schedule so they don't end up waiting until the last minute? Planning how to use time effectively and setting a timeline for a research project is a necessary skill, just as much as knowing how to use a piece of lab equipment.
I think college courses are difficult because you have limited control of the order in which students take courses, however in this case I think the general answer is that each course needs to remove scaffolding from beginning to end. I.e. in your lab class first lab has a full timeline laid out and each successive lab removes scaffolding and as part of the instruction you explain what each peice of the scaffold was there for and why it is important students are able to do it themselves. Last lab maybe is as open as a more real world task but maybe give them an initial assignment of making their *own* scaffold/plan/schedule) which will also give time to give them feedback on their plan before you receive drivel :-)
Personally, I feel like the scaffolding is just a way for us in the lower levels of high school and middle school to maintain some sense of integrity while keeping the pass rate at ~100%. These days, unless I completely scaffold every single step of the assignment (as in, tell the kid they need to divide here, multiply here...), I will get shrugs and incompletes. Doing a lab like rolling a cart down a ramp takes ~3 hours of class time. I can't send homework home because kids simply don't do it when I do. Any time I try to disengage the training wheels, kids lock up or simply start asking me to show them how to do the work. The last time I took away the training wheels, my failure rate spikes to about 60% of students. With the training wheels, it's still a struggle to get the fail rate below 20%, and I have to do a lot of small group work. Not to mention that we have trained kids to feel that every single deadline is infinitely negotiable. I have kids turning in copied work 5 weeks late today, expecting a grade because they simply turned something in. And you know what? I'm taking the papers, because I have to.
So yeah, we do them no favors, and the durability that students need to build is getting left until later years. Colleges are now having to pick up the load. Saplings need the breeze to strengthen their trunks, and without strength they fall over and die from their own weight.
So I've increased scaffolding not in lower division classes but in upper-division and grad classes less to hold their hands than to help mitigate AI use. Sure, at each step in the process they could use AI, but as the parts become a whole it is harder for that to happen (at each stage the AI would have to be able to speak to itself to create a seamless whole). Meanwhile in the History survey my never moving away from blue books means that I am so out of fashion I am back in fashion. Neo-Ludditism for the win!
I think this discussion needs to be had in conjunction with the cost of failure. Let's say you do what some in the public seem to think should be done, simply provide no major scaffolding, and fail the students who can't hack it. As a steward of your profession, shouldn't you be weeding out the weaker students so that only the best, most capable continue on? What, after all, is the value of a degree if someone's hand is held the whole way by their professors? Aren't you watering down the quality by scaffolding? Just fail them, right?
It's not that I believe these things are necessarily the right path or that the assumptions underpinning them are true (e.g. that failing because of deadlines means you are intellectually incapable of the work) but that this line of thinking needs to be addressed. There are powerful pro-meritocratic (or at least they present it that way) forces who would like to see collegiate education become more exclusive and who do argue that kids up and down the educational ranks need to be failed more.
The key point of disagreement between these approaches has to do with whether the students who "can't hack it" are lacking some innate ability to do the work for the subject in question, or whether they're lacking some ancillary "soft skills" (time management, study skills, knowing about and taking advantage of available resources for extra help, etc.) that aren't directly related to the course material. If you believe the latter, then the correct approach is to add some supports to help them navigate the courses while they catch up on the ancillary skills. Done properly, this should actually strengthen the majors, by bringing in students who have the talents needed to be good but otherwise might've been "weeded out" for reasons that have little relation to the subject matter.
The problem I worry about is that if you don't do this right, you just sort of pass the issue of ancillary skill deficiencies on to the next course in the sequence. Which isn't actually helping anything or anyone to get better.