Isolating difficulty is just like riding a bike
or: how to build confidence and scaffold learning, for all ages
Remember struggling to learn something really complex as a child, and feeling overwhelmed or helpless? Then you might like to understand the Montessori concept of “isolation of difficulty.” - it’s one of those ideas that just clicked for me as a guide once I saw it in action, and has permeated my life in every possible way since.
So what does it mean? Simply put, “isolation of difficulty” means devising strategies or designing materials (aka learning-support objects or devices) that build upon previously learned skills while isolating just one new challenge at a time, or as few as possible.
You can see it even in Montessori puzzles for babies. The first puzzle we introduce is a simple circle shape with a large knob. This is so the baby, who already has a more refined grasp and can manipulate the piece by its knob (from working with previous materials in the curriculum), practices aligning the circle with the circle-shaped hole. Once that is mastered, we introduce more complex shapes like a square and a triangle. Now the baby has to learn how to rotate their wrist to make the shape fit properly. Once all three shapes are down, there is a new challenge: a puzzle with all three shapes! This is because the baby (likely now a toddler) is working on telling the shapes apart, to understand that the square will not fit into the circular hole, or the triangular one, and so on. Fine motor skills, visual discrimination, and problem-solving - all tackled separately. It keeps going from there - more in a future post!
You can *also* see isolation of difficulty beyond puzzles or even school, in the way we approach all kinds of skill-learning.
Take learning how to ride a bike, for example. How did you learn? If you’re a nineties kid like me, you probably had a bike with a small set of removable training wheels attached at the back, so you’d be able to pedal and steer before you were able to balance - which was probably the hardest skill, if you remember (I sure do). Eventually, with help from a parent, encouragement and maybe a literal push, you finally managed to ride without them. Ah, freedom!!!
Riding a bike well involves developing several new skills - the main three being steering, balancing, and pedalling. While the first tends to be very intuitive, the latter two can be hard for most young kids with average motor skills.
That’s why my preferred method of teaching a child to ride a bike is a bit different. I like to split these skills into different pathways that all converge:
For steering, it’s mostly preparatory work: anything that involves using both hands and that fosters hand-eye coordination is going to prepare a child to steer with very little practice.
The balancing part itself is the hardest, and the best way to learn fast is with a balance bike - which is a bicycle with a fixed front wheel and without pedals, where kids go forward by pushing with their feet against the ground. They also start to steer by leaning one way or the other. Very little has to be taught here - kids just figure out how to use them without an adult explaining how it’s done. After a while, they start to lift their feet from the ground for longer and longer periods, and effectively learn to balance. It makes riding fun, exciting and builds their confidence immensely!
Pedalling usually needs to be taught a little bit at first, or at least observed, and ideally is uncoupled from the balancing component - on a trike, where kids can practice the movement without needing to also balance at the same time. By this time, they will have also learned to steer by practicing on the bike.
When kids work on these skills separately, very soon they’re able to put them together and ride a pedal bike, without training wheels, completely on their own! I don’t know what the stats are, but anecdotally it seems like kids who learn this way are on pedal bikes earlier. To me, the process would still be better, even if the results were the same, because the feeling of self-efficacy and independence that you derive from learning something on your own is as important as unlocking the skill itself.
(🅱️ tangent: this is why it matters *how* babies develop gross motor skills like rolling, crawling and sitting too, not just that they all eventually reach those milestones. But more on that another time.)
It’s a useful concept to have present in your mind when thinking about creating learning experiences for children or even adults. Instead of applying force, extra motivation or a “push”, consider the ways in which the environment could be breaking down a skill into many sub-skills, and work from there to create separate opportunities for them to be developed.
I’ve noticed I tend to apply this strategy to many things that are hard for me to learn and overcome: I start by noticing what I already can do, thinking of what I want to achieve, and then thinking of creative ways to isolate the difficulty of the intermediate stages - including changes in my environment or the objects that I use - so that I can build my own confidence and get there step by step without getting discouraged.
For parents it can also be useful. Whether you’re helping a baby distinguish shapes, a young child learn to read or a teenager work on a complex project, you can find ways for them to be more independent in their learning by making sure the environment around them is building up the skills they need for the thing they’re trying to do.
Soon it’ll become second nature and you’ll find yourself doing the same for everything in your life including your own goals, scaffolding your own progress, until you can’t remember a time where you struggled to. It is just like riding a bike.