Part-whole

• • Chain forwards

    • • An example of forward chaining is writing a lab report (which can consist of the following parts: Introduction, Hypothesis, Method, Results, Discussion, Conclusion). The teacher could have students practice each part progressively starting with the introduction, then in the next demo or experiment the hypothesis, etc. Once students are comfortable with each part in isolation, they can write an entire one on their own.

  • Chain backwards

    • • In this strategy students start with the end in mind and are supported incrementally in learning the necessary prior skills/knowledges. For example, in an engineering design project, tell the students what the outcome should be/look like and walk them backwards through the process, practicing the necessary earlier skills.

  • Snowball

    • • This a variation of the forward/backward chaining strategy. In each new activity, students practice the new segment as well as all the previous ones (e.g. week1: introduction, week 2: introduction and hypothesis, week 3: introduction, hypothesis and method, etc.)

      • If snowballing is too demanding, one can semi-snowball by keeping the number of tasks a student works on to a maximum of, say, 3 tasks (e.g. week 3: introduction, hypothesis and method, week 4: hypothesis, method and results, etc.)

Whole-part

• • Simplify conditions

    • • A presentation (think science fair) requires the combination of multiple component skills such as gestures, intonation, pacing eye-contact, volume of voice, etc. It makes little sense to practice each of these in isolation (imagine asking a student to stand at the front of the class and only do eye-contact for 5 minutes). In this strategy, students practice all the skills simultaneously but the conditions are simplified (e.g. practice presenting something students are very familiar with or present to a smaller, less intimidating audience).

  • Manipulate the emphasis

    • • Have students practice all the skills simultaneously but emphasizes that you are only focusing on a single aspect (e.g. students will present their project but you will only judge them for their ability to write a good hypothesis).

Skills/knowledge hierarchy

• A good place to start when designing a lesson is to lay out all the necessary building blocks of knowledge and skill (call this atomization), then organize these atomized ideas in a hierarchy. Then design the lessons with scaffolds to walk students through the hierarchy.

Cut an element

• In some cases identifying the interacting elements may be easy. For example, when doing a lab, students may need to think of a hypothesis then test it by finding the mass of two chemicals before then combining them to observe the temperature of the reaction. To reduce the element interactivity, the teacher may provide the hypothesis the pre-massed chemicals leaving the students to only focus on measuring the temperature.

Interleaving

• • Having students work on a block of work, always dealing with the same idea "X", means students don't need to think as hard. They know the answer to the question or activity will somehow have to do with "X". Reinvesting concepts or skills from other units regularly not only makes learning science a more connected field of study (not random/useless isolated facts) but also students are forced to think harder to make sense of the task or question.