Scaffolding

Guiding Questions

How will you make sure students are able to focus on the key elements of tasks in your classing
How will you make sure that all students can access the content of your lesson?

Scaffolding

Scaffolding is a term that refers to the supports teachers use to help students access content and activities that might otherwise be outside of their zone of proximal development.

Scaffolds help students through the cognitive processes required to complete a task. Scaffolds help guide students through the organizational, linguistic, or cognitive parts of a task that might be too overwhelming all at once.

The goal of scaffolds is to use them to help students practice applying skills and content knowledge until the scaffolds become internalized and are no longer required.

Scaffolding and Working Memory

The main goal of scaffolding is to allow students to focus their working memory on the most important part of the learning task. Watch the video to the right to learn more about working memory.

Organizational Scaffolds

Organizational scaffolds are supports that help students organize the information needed to complete a task. These are usually table/graphic organizers that help students visualize the relationships between different ideas or parts of a task or simple table organizers.

Examples:

Table organizer (Social Studies)

Cause/Effect Organizer

Directions to get to Achieve 3000's Graphic Organizer Library

Linguistic Scaffolds

Linguistic scaffolds provide language supports that help students access content and engage in the thinking required to complete grade level tasks. Linguistic scaffolds usually fall into two categories:

Reading/Listening Scaffolds (Receptive Language)

These scaffolds work to help students access written text or spoken language, usually by defining key vocabulary and/or providing additional ways for students to access the information.

Examples of this type of scaffold would be providing vocabulary resources to accompany a reading, as well as including visuals in a reading.

Writing/Speaking Scaffolds (expressive language)

These scaffolds help students by providing language to help student express their thinking. Providing a scaffold like sentence frames helps students focus on their ideas as opposed to what words to use to get started.

On the paragraph level, sentence frames

Cognitive Scaffolds

Cognitive scaffolds usually take the form of clear directions and exemplar products (see pg. 2), which help to ensure that students know exactly what's expected of them.

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