We’ve all been there, halfway through an amazingly planned (and executed!) lesson on the chain rule when everything comes grinding to a halt—not because of the difficulty of the content, but because students haven’t had to think about functional composition since last October.
The traditional solution has been straightforward: at the start of the year, look at your curriculum and see what foundational skills students will need to succeed during the year. Spend anywhere from a few days to a few weeks reviewing that material. While this sounds good on paper, reality tells a different story. Even after spending two days at the start of the year reviewing factoring quadratics when a ≠1, students once again need a refresher in factoring by the time you’re teaching solving rational equations in January. So, what was the point in spending that time at the start of the year?
Corequisite support isn’t “re-teaching” last year’s material. It is surgically identifying the specific, dormant skills that will need to be awakened before they derail an upcoming lesson. It occurs intentionally in the moment, not at the start of the year in anticipation of a lesson down the line. It is not a push, but just a slight nudge to prepare students for success. Keep these core principles in mind when implementing nudges:
Traditional remediation dumps every skill that students will likely need for an upcoming unit, or even for the course at the start of the year. Corequisite support is a “just-in-time” nudge, occurring the same day (and usually just minutes before) the knowledge is needed. This ensures the connection is fresh and top of students’ minds, ready to be applied.
If an algebraic representation didn’t help a student master the material the first time around, repeating the same procedure louder and slower is rarely a successful strategy. Just like all other class components, nudges should span the representational spectrum in offering diverse presentation methods of concepts provides more avenues for students to flourish.
A nudge is not a separate component of a lesson, but is rather an instructional sprint. Since your schedule is already tightly packed, these nudges must fit seamlessly into your block. Nudges demand high-leverage engagement and should not last more than 5 minutes—at a maximum. Debrief the friction point and keep the train moving.
A scaffold aims to reduce unnecessary cognitive load but does not sacrifice rigor by lowering the cognitive demand of the core mathematical concepts and skills being covered. The ideal nudge provides a temporary framework to help students handle the previous knowledge so that they can free up their brains to handle the new concepts and skills being covered.
While sometimes spontaneous out of necessity, true nudges are often a result of mindful preparation to equip students and are not an on-the-fly rescue mission once a lesson starts going down a dark path. When planning out units and lessons, predict and map out where the algebraic rust may topple the lesson, and intentionally embed the nudge right before that moment.
Scaffolding, when done properly, ensures—without sacrificing pacing or even student expectations—that lessons stay on track and aren’t derailed by rusty mathematical skills. These nudges treat foundational gaps and fuzzy memories for what they are: temporary hurdles to high-level conceptual understanding, not the permanent roadblocks we fear. The next time you worry about algebraic rust getting in the way of a great lesson, don't tear up all your plans. Just plan your nudge and keep the train moving.