Instructions - Risky Business

One final note is in order about scaffolding. As we have learned from much research by Piaget and others, we can only scaffold skills for which some amount of the underlying capacity is already present. For example, we routinely teach young elementary school children how to do complex subtraction, using borrowing. They learn a mechanical algorithm for what to do when “the number on top is smaller than the number on the bottom.”

These young students may not understand anything about the abstract principle of place value that drives the algorithm. And in fact, they will make many mistakes later on, when they must un-learn the rules they once used only to re-learn subtraction using the higher principle. But they can become quite proficient at subtraction before acquiring this abstract knowledge. This “scaffolding” of development, however, would not be possible if the young student did not already know how to do simple subtraction. And so it is with social development. Teenagers know the rudimentary “facts” about bullies, sexual harassers and physically aggressive peers. They have learned social rules. They have values. They can multi-task (...er...sometimes). They have the constituent parts of rational, emotional human beings. But the adolescent brain just isn’t “working as a team” – yet! There is no integrated flow of information because pruning and myelinization are not complete.

In this context, we can give the brain some practice. We can provide teenagers with mechanical tools – three skills – to bring the parts of their brains together. We can give them drills to apply the skills in varying high-risk social contexts, and “beat out maturation” in circumscribed playing fields.

Can we ever “outsmart” development? No! But we can teach students to “cross out the number on top and make it one smaller.” And from all of the data we have gathered over the years, we have learned to have a very healthy respect for human resilience. When we scaffold development, we unleash hidden capacities in adolescents that they can exploit to create “holding environments” for themselves, keeping them safe until maturation eventually catches up.