The Domino Effect and What Teachers Can Do About It
Whether it’s an entire line of dominoes or a series of cars in a car crash, the impact of one tiny movement is mesmerizing. That same principle applies to student learning. When students try to compensate for weak foundational skills it taxes their working memory capacity and can hinder the development of those important core skill. In this article we’ll explore how the Domino Effect impacts student learning, and what teachers can do about it.
Most of us have seen the satisfying videos of a long row of dominoes carefully set up and then nudged just so, all toppling over in a chain reaction. In fact, you can even attend domino shows where builders compete to create the most imaginative or complex Domino effects before an audience of fans.
What makes the Domino effect so interesting is that it’s completely unpredictable. A single domino may fall or not, and if it doesn’t, the next one won’t either. But once the first domino does fall, if it’s the right one, then all the others will follow.
In the case of a long line of dominoes, that first fall can reveal an intricate pattern or piece of art beneath it. It can also set off a chain reaction that leads to the final fall of hundreds or thousands of dominoes.
The idea of a chain reaction or domino effect is a perfect metaphor for how narrative works. Every scene in a story has the potential to be the one that triggers the next big event or even the whole plot. The challenge for writers is to figure out what that domino will be.
A domino is a small, thumb-sized rectangular block of a material such as wood or clay that has a surface that can be marked with pips (dots). Each domino has two parts, a blank or a face bearing from one to six pips or dots. A complete domino set contains 28 unique pieces. A domino set can be used for various games, including blocking and scoring games.
Most of the traditional domino games involve emptying a player’s hand while blocking opponents’ play, with a winner being determined by counting the number of pips in the loser’s hands. Some games are adaptations of card games that can be played with dominoes to avoid religious proscriptions against playing cards.
Like a domino, a writer’s work requires careful planning and execution to make sure the overall project stays on track. If not, the work can quickly go off course and end up nowhere at all. That’s why it is helpful for writers to use tools such as outlines and Scrivener to help them keep their scenes in order and on point. But even the most skilled writers can occasionally have scenes that don’t raise tension or connect logically with those that come before them. For example, a heroine’s discovery of a clue in one scene has no logical impact on the storyline in the following scene.