Principle 07
Dynamic Scaffolding
Hold the task, then take your hands off.
- Function
- ZPD guidance → automaticity
- Substrates
- Frontostriatal loops · basal ganglia · cerebellum
- Intervention
- Contingent prompts, fading, transfer of responsibility
- In transfer
- Turns a mapped graph into an independent move in the target domain.
Wood, Bruner and Ross: support is contingent, it fades, and responsibility transfers. Anything else is a lecture. van de Pol’s triad is the control law for Stage 3.
The ‘shift from PFC to basal ganglia’ is the skill-automatization story; it does not complete in five minutes. In twenty minutes you can fade prompts, not build procedural automaticity.
Wood, Bruner & Ross 1976; van de Pol et al. 2010; Vygotsky 1978