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from Barry:
"Many of the instructions, and even basic discipline, seem to be a carried out like a full-scale Socratic dialogue with the goal being that the child discovers the all-mysterious point the teacher is trying to make."
Many teachers think that the above is an example of "guided discovery". It isn't. Guided discovery means providing direct information and then asking leading questions based on this information and providing scaffolding as necessary to get students to the next level. Information is given all along, but students are kept actively engaged through questions that 1)allow them to apply the information they have just been given, and 2) to make cognitive leaps to the next level, ala the "spark gap" analogy that Instructivist described some time back. Singapore does this in their textbooks.
I'm going to bug Barry until he writes up an explanation of scaffolding.
I've developed a sense of what scaffolding is in the abstract, but I need more!
