Ask what support the situation is giving you right now
Before judging your performance, name the people, tools, and cues the situation is supplying.
Pourquoi ça marche
On Fischer’s account, the level at which a person performs depends on the support the context provides. A strong performance may come from support you did not notice, such as a colleague who set the agenda, and a weak one may come from support that was absent. Listing the supports makes a performance readable, and shows what to bring into a similar situation when the support is missing.
Comment faire
- After a good performance, list everything that helped: people, documents, timing, the room.
- After a poor one, list what from that list was missing.
- Choose one support you can bring yourself next time.
- Test it in the next similar situation and compare the result.
Données probantes
The claim that performance depends on the support a context gives is from Lectica’s summary of Fischer’s theory. The title of Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer and Wood (1993) names contextual support as the variable studied, but I could not read its findings, so no effect is claimed here. (mechanistic)
Support can prop up a performance that is not really your own, and this practice does not by itself separate that from genuine skill.
Sources
- Kitchener, K. S., Lynch, C. L., Fischer, K. W., & Wood, P. K. (1993). Developmental range of reflective judgment: The effect of contextual support and practice on developmental stage. Developmental Psychology, 29(5), 893–906.
- Lectica. Skill theory: Kurt Fischer [web page, a secondary summary of the theory]. Accessed 2026-10-14.
Erreur fréquente
Crediting your own ability for a good result that a supportive setup produced, or blaming yourself for a poor one a missing support caused, without checking which.
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Plus de pratiques pour Dynamic Skill Theory: Development Built Context by Context
- Name the context a skill belongs to
Write down the situation in which a skill works, because the skill is tied to that situation.
- Compare what you do with help and what you do alone
Find the level you reach with good support and the level you reach without it, then work in the gap between them.
- Practise a skill in the real situations you will meet
Practise a skill in the kinds of situations you will actually meet, not only the one where you first learned it.
- Let different skills sit at different levels at once
Accept that one part of you can be advanced while another is still forming, and work on each one separately.
- Expect a skill to slip under stress and plan for it
Expect that a skill may drop under pressure, and plan the support for that moment.
- Build the emotional and meaning side of a skill, not only the action
Pay attention to what you feel and what the skill means to you, because both are part of the skill you are building.
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- Lines of Development: Why People Grow Unevenly
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- Vertical Development Practices: How Adults Grow, Not Just Add Skills
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- Scaffolding: Die Kunst der temporären Lernunterstützung
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