Instructional Scaffolding

What does instructional scaffolding DO??

•Helps ensure a student’s success•Extends competence into new territory•Can be taken away as the student

becomes more responsible ▫Here, think about the building metaphor –

scaffolding as you are putting up a building. When the building is built, you don’t need the scaffolding.

Names

•Jerome Bruner▫The Process of Education

•Lev Vygotsky▫Thought and Language

Scaffolding

•Linking what we know about learning in more “natural” contexts to how we think about learning in schools (less natural contexts)

•Trying to translate things that work in a one-on-one model to a school classroom situation

Social Construction of Knowledge

•Knowledge is constructed rather than transmitted

•Learning happens through social interaction

A few key things

•Novices and experts•You as a teacher have to know where your

students’ ZPD is.•“just enough support”•P. 171 – to support students’ attempts at

more difficult language and thinking tasks

Zone of Proximal Development• Cognitive distance between what learners

know and can do on their own, and what they are currently capable of doing with the assistance of a more knowledgeable person.

• The novice reader or writer learns new skills in contexts where more skilled language users provide the support necessary to carry through unfamiliar tasks

• The most appropriate tasks will be those that involve abilities that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation , or in Vygotsky’s terms, abilities that are not so much “ripe” as “ripening.”

Two slightly different perspectives on scaffoldingApplebee and Langer Hogan and Pressley

• Looking at reading and writing tasks

• Building on qualities of learning in more natural (i.e. out of school) contexts

• Building on models of language learning

• Looking at science classrooms

• looking at how a teacher can scaffold through▫ Whole class

conversation▫ talk

• Language learning (how kids learn to talk about science and their thinking)

Components of Scaffolding

•Intentionality/student ownership of the goals

•Appropriateness•Structure/supportive instruction•Collaboration/shared responsibility•Internalization