I like the idea, but looking at your examples I'm skeptical that it actually works out that way much in practice. Let's look at your examples, in order.
Hearing pitch isn't scaffolding you remove once you learn to sing, which is why skilled vocalists still have ear pieces so that they can hear themselves when they perform. I'm sure they could still sing better than you even with earplugs in, but not to their potential -- and their performance would likely degrade with time if you cut that feedback loop.
"Rolling" is absolutely a big part of fighting. It's not a huge part of striking, but it's a huge part the grappling aspect of fighting which doesn't go away, and the rolling only becomes more prevalent at the higher levels of grappling. Heck, Jiu Jitsu is one of the main components of modern MMA, and their term for sparring is literally "rolling".
If getting into a fencing jacket isn't a scaffolding skill, then I don't see how getting into donning helmets and gloves can be -- for the exact same reasons. Same with training wheels, which you typically have your parents do for you.
Training wheels have an additional problem in that they actually rob you of the feedback you need in order to learn to ride a bike, making it harder. You could argue that catching yourself with your feet on a balance bike becomes the scaffolding skill, and this is indeed not an integral part of high performance bike riding... but every time you dismount a bike you use this skill. And it's never a limiting skill in the first place.
Skimming through the rest of your examples, it looks like my objections break down into 3 categories.
- That skill is an integral part of high performance, even though once you reach high performance you can perform at low levels okay without it.
- There are other ways to do that, in the same way that a fencer could hire an assistant to help him get into his jacket.
- That doesn't actually help develop the skill. You're better off skipping the metaphorical training wheels and working on the thing itself.
If we get rid of the second criterion, then there are a lot of things that would fit the requirements. That also seems fair, since there are a lot of times you can't reasonably hire an assistant to get you into your jacket, or to make good pitches for your games. But then again, those would be better described as "supporting skills", because fencers don't stop putting on their fencing jackets once they learn to fence.
I'm struggling to come up with an example of a skill you could really remove to no significant detriment once you get good at the thing. Skilled rock climbers by and large would be pretty pissed if you took their ropes, for example. You might be fine forgetting how to navigate Duolingo's interface once you're fluent, but that skill seems hardly necessary or limiting in the first place.
It just seems too often that the skills that enable a thing either continue to enable the thing or else enable other things. For example, even if rolling was no longer helpful in fighting it's also a skill I've applied to bike riding, for when I've gone over the handlebars -- long after I'd learned to ride a bike.
1I think you're right but I also think I can provide examples of "true" scaffolding skills:
- How to pass an exam: in order to keep learning with the academic system/university/school you need to regularly do good enough at exams. That is a skill in itself (read the exam in its entirety, know when to move on, learn how hard a question is likely to be depending on the phrasing of the following questions, ...) Almost everyone safely forget most of this skill once they are done studying.
- Learn to understand your teacher's feedback: many teachers, professional or otherwise, suck at communicating their feedback. You often need to develop a skill of understanding that specific individual's feedback. Of course there is a underlying universal skill of "being good at learning how individuals give feedback"; we could think of it as the skill "being good at building a specific kind of scaffolding".
- Learn to accept humiliating defeat: A martial artist friend told me it is important at first to learn to accept losing all the time because you learn in the company of strictly better martial artists. Once you get better, you presumably lose less often.
I think that the training wheels example is wrong. A quick search suggests they hinder learning how to ride a bike.
Anyway, I have a few more examples ([actual skill] / [scaffolding skill]):
- Playing chess well / reading algebraic notation
- Writing blog posts / touch typing
- Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things)
Cutting vegetables / sharpening knivesQSself-experiments / knowing statistics- Programming / debugging
- Parkour / running
- Dancing / aerobic endurance (This might be stretching the concept a bit)
Disagree with
- Cooking / cutting vegetables (also other things)
- Cutting vegetables / sharpening knives
- QS experiments / knowing statistics
The first two is pretty much like sketch / making pencils and paper, and the third one is absolutely essential and not a skill than you can not have
re 2: Now that you mention it, I realized sharpening can be easily outsourced. My mistake.
re 1: I don't see it, buying pre-chopped onions is simply not equivalent to having a freshly chopped onion and some vegetables cannot be bought pre-cut. While cutting isn't a bottleneck for most people I had this chain in mind: (no cutting skills) -> (cooking takes more time and is less pleasant) -> (Less willingness to try new or complex recipes).
(Also, if you don't have proper technique, you're at a higher risk of cutting yourself. In that respect, it's like free climbing / using safety ropes)
re 3: I had self-experiments in general in mind (people run self-experiments, without knowing statistics, or even gathering data), but it did not occur to me that not all self-experiments are QS (probably most aren't). As written you are, of course, correct.
Most of your examples seem more like "prerequisites" or basic skills that you build on. But scaffolding is a thing you build up to get something else done, then get rid of afterwards. So, a scaffolding skill would be a skill that enables you to learn how to do something you actually want to learn, but once you have learned how to do that thing, you no longer need the scaffolding skill.
Algebraic notation can still be useful to a chess player. Knowing basics like how to properly cut things is integral to cooking. Debugging is an essential skill for programming. Etc.
A couple better examples of scaffolding skills:
- In calculus, learning to calculate a derivative using limits. Once you have the concept of derivatives down, you wouldn't go through that exercise, you would use the the various formulas (or a math program) to actually calculate them.
- When trying to get a business group to adopt Agile methodology, using strict Agile Scrum, which gives a bunch of prescriptive processes, and demonstrate how to "do Agile". But, teams that have internalized the Agile philosophy tend to ditch many of those processes (or at least strict adherence to them) as they move toward more efficient approaches, tailored to their situation.
Epistemic status: Exploratory
A scaffold is a lightweight, temporary construction whose point is to make working on other buildings easier. Maybe you could live and work on a scaffold, but why would you? The point is the building. When the building is done, you can take down the scaffold, though you might put it back up if you need to do repairs. If your scaffold was shaky and unsteady, or fell over when you were halfway up, this would make it harder to work on the building.
Here's the thesis of this essay: sometimes I think skills are also scaffolds; more useful for what else they let you learn than for the skill itself. One reason a skill might be weirdly hard to learn is you lack scaffolding skills and don't realize this. It's like trying to fix a third story window without a scaffold.
Ia.
Things that are scaffolding skills:
I'm not very good at hearing pitch. It's not quite tone deafness, but whatever it is has gotten me singled out in two different music classes. We'd all be singing, and the teacher would frown, then ask more and more people to stop until they got to me and it would turn out I was like an octave and a half off without realizing.
The ability to hear whether you're on the note or not is a vital scaffolding skill for learning to sing.
I've said before that being able to fall and roll is the first lesson taught in many martial arts classes. Why is that? After all, rolling isn't the most useful thing in a fight, and it's not the simplest technique. You don't get thrown that much in street fights. Why don't we start with throws? One significant reason is that it's not safe to be thrown without knowing how to roll.
The ability to be thrown and land safely is a vital scaffolding skill for learning to fight. Same with learning how to correctly don helmets and gloves, for styles that use those.
Attaching training wheels to a bicycle takes a little bit of mechanical know-how. You want them even, you want them firmly attached, you need to know what kind of training wheels go to which bike. Of course, once you know how to ride a bike without training wheels, you don't need to know how to attach them. (At least until you have kids and need to put training wheels on their bikes.)
Learning to how to put training wheels on your bike isn't vital to learning how to ride a bike. You can learn without and just fall down more, or you can have someone else attach them for you. But it's a useful scaffold.
Ib.
Things that are not scaffolding skills:
Getting into a fencing jacket is a bit weird. The zipper is at the back and it's fairly low, not unlike zipping up a dress back but with stiff fabric restricting your movements somewhat. For competitions you have to do it while threading a wire through the sleeve and not getting it tangled.
This is not a scaffolding skill. Olympic fencers still zip their own jackets. It's not the main focus perhaps, but it's still an ongoing part of being a fencer, even if you'd never notice the lack mid-bout if some idiot savant fencer who couldn't zip their own jacket or tie their own shoes but had an assistant to do it.
You want good pencils and paper to learn to sketch. You could study and study, only attempting a practice sketch infrequently or by scraping lines in flat rocks, but that sounds much harder.
Making pencils and paper is not a scaffolding skill. Maybe it helps to know the material, and at the higher levels I'd believe artists find it worthwhile to get so precise about their paper they decide to make their own. But you can just buy a bunch in the store, it's fine. Someone needs to make it, but it doesn't need to be you.
Knowing how to pass the ball in football is useful. In pickup games, people are happier to play with you if you pass the ball a lot.
But passing the ball isn't a scaffolding skill for football, it's just a regular skill. You keep using it in football.
Ic.
Here's a few more of short skill / scaffolding skill examples.
II.
Some skills are unusually hard to learn. One reason a skill might be hard to learn is that you lack accompanying scaffolding skills and don't realize this.
At some point, I realized I wanted to get better at running tabletop RPGs. I'd suggest a new ruleset or about wanting to do more plot twists, post about wanting to play it on social media or talk excitedly to my roommates about it, and. . . fail to get practice.
The scaffolding skill I needed was the ability to make short, compelling pitches for games. Once I had that, more people showed up to play in games, letting me practice. Also, it helped to learn to make good homemade food, not just pizza delivery.
Some ground level skills are anti-inductive, highly variable, twisty and full of traps for the unwary. Relationships can be like this, where after a few years you might have a couple of serious relationship attempts that crashed and burned, but you don't really know what went wrong. Conflict resolution is one, where you seldom get to find out what would have happened if you'd tried something else.
And then there's the skills where if you do it sufficiently wrong you're dead, like coup attempts.
Scaffolding skills — ways to set up safe places to stand as you work on the thing that matters — may be useful investments.
III.
What are general kinds of scaffolding skills?
Some scaffolding skills are your feedback loops, helping you learn from each attempt. It's fairly obvious in fencing whether you're getting better - are you stabbing the other bloke more than he's stabbing you - but it's not as obvious whether you're singing off key unless you can hear it. (Or cheat with an app.)
Some scaffolding skills let you try and try and try again when otherwise you'd only get a few tries. If you had a significant risk of injury every time you got thrown, or if you couldn't buy more pencils and paper in the store, then you wouldn't learn as much.
I also think there's an important category of scaffolding skills that allow you to reach new heights you just couldn't achieve without them. I don't know enough about house construction to know if this is a good analogy, but if I imagine building a six story house then having a scaffold to stand on when putting in the fourth story windows sounds useful.
If you find your progress is slowing down on some skill you care about, consider looking if there's adjacent scaffolding you could learn to build better.