Personally, I thought “mind-hanger” was ok. I got an image of a coat-hanger for the mind. You could even include that image explicitly in your concept mapping pictures.
Some other ideas that stick with the coat-hanger variant would be “idea-hanger”, “concept-hanger”.
Another term you might consider is scaffolding. This also has a strong concrete image of construction scaffolding, but the metaphor lends itself to the idea of building on top of the skeletal example, just as we start a building project with a scaffold and then build the real building around it. Often the scaffold is removed at the end, which can also happen with abstraction, where we can throw away the pedegogic examples once we’ve mastered the bigger idea. We don’t really build anything on top of a coat hanger (nor a ship’s anchor).
Personally, I thought “mind-hanger” was ok. I got an image of a coat-hanger for the mind. You could even include that image explicitly in your concept mapping pictures.
Some other ideas that stick with the coat-hanger variant would be “idea-hanger”, “concept-hanger”.
Another term you might consider is scaffolding. This also has a strong concrete image of construction scaffolding, but the metaphor lends itself to the idea of building on top of the skeletal example, just as we start a building project with a scaffold and then build the real building around it. Often the scaffold is removed at the end, which can also happen with abstraction, where we can throw away the pedegogic examples once we’ve mastered the bigger idea. We don’t really build anything on top of a coat hanger (nor a ship’s anchor).