Ahhh scaffolding…. You may see it in many places. From developmental psych textbooks to business management trainings. But therapists can use scaffolding in therapy to help clients effectively learn key skills to improve their lives.
Scaffolding is a helpful concept in human learning. It refers to breaking down certain tasks or skills into smaller tasks. For example, playing an entire song on the guitar starts with learning each chord included in the song. The individual gains increased overall proficiency as they continue to learn each successive task.
Scaffolding begins with learning early basic skills and progresses over time to more advanced skills. You see this everywhere. Remember when you learned single digit number addition (e.g., 4+5) before learning how to add multiple digits (e.g., 24+13).
The key to effective scaffolding, however, is that the individual should have enough information or ability imparted for one task or from previously learned tasks to be able to complete the next task mostly on their own (with mild to moderate difficulty). This “sweet spot” of foundational skills relative to the challenge of new learning is the “zone of proximal development”.
Effort needed to learn the next step using foundational skills helps us learn a task more effectively (better learning “potentiation”). In addition, confidence for completing the skill and approaching similar challenges also increases.
Scaffolding was originally proposed by Russian psychologist Lev Vygostky. He was “the man” when it came to many developmental and learning principles. Vygostky initially proposed and studied scaffolding as a way for young children to most effectively learn new life skills. This included how parents and teachers could break down tasks for children to enhance learning.
Since effective therapy is a form of learning, scaffolding can be used to more effectively teach clients new skills. Let’s think about someone learning concrete coping skills (e.g., those in CBT, DBT, behavioral activation, exposure, ACT, etc). The therapist does not just teach a client the most advanced skills, then they go do it, then lives improve. Therapists break those skills down into smaller skills that progressively lead to a larger set of coping skills.
The key for therapists is to give clients enough skills for them to be able to complete the next successive skill with only a little coaching. In CBT, challenging thoughts is not advised until the client has some ability to recognize negative thoughts on their own. Another example concerns learning initial mindfulness techniques. Clients learn to notice breath and bodily sensations before they practice longer sustained mindfulness or emotion recognition.
Scaffolding isn’t just for the kids (although it might be, if you’re a child therapist!). It is a highly effective approach to learning at all ages and skillsets, including coping skills in therapy. Coupled with empathy, learning concrete skills is extremely necessary for therapy to be effective. It helps clients tackle challenges they face when therapists are not around. That would be the 10,080 minutes of a client’s entire week, minus the 30-50 minutes they are in a therapy session.
