A scaffolding perspective on teacher guidance in challenge-based courses

As we know little about the specific techniques teachers currently use to guide students within those different CBL courses, MADE provides a practical case study. Furthermore, we are curious about the way that different kinds of guidance build on each other in the curriculum. In this article, we describe and analyse four CBL courses within the MADE programme (‘Metropolitan Challenges’, ‘Metropolitan Innovators’, ‘Metropolitan Solutions’, and ‘Living Lab’) that are connected parts of a learning trajectory towards collaborative problem-solving skills. We analyse the courses from the perspective of ‘scaffolding’, a pedagogical approach that introduces temporary support for students to gain problem-solving experience without decreasing the complexity of the process. The four analysed courses all dive deeply into a metropolitan challenge yet offer different kinds of scaffolds. In the first two courses, scaffolding is focused on ‘direction maintenance’; at a later stage, ‘frustration control’ becomes more dominant in teacher guidance. Teachers can use scaffolding approaches to connect to the student learning in their own CBL course and as a language for continued guidance throughout a CBL curriculum.