Scaffolding helps students to become self-regulating and independent learners and problem solvers. When students are given the support, they need while learning something new, they stand a better chance of using that knowledge independently. Scaffolds are intended to be temporary and just-in-time support structures that are put in place to assist students in accessing new concepts and tasks that they typically could not achieve on their own. Once students are capable of completing tasks or mastering concepts, the scaffolding is gradually removed. Scaffolding is meant to lift students to a higher level of performance.
Instructional scaffolding can be challenging for many reasons - planning for it can be time consuming; selection of the appropriate strategies for the lesson or concept; and knowing when to remove the scaffold so students don’t rely on the support.
This blog post will outline scaffolding structures that may benefit your students in accessing appropriate grade-level mathematics content. Developing your scaffolding toolbox may be especially beneficial as we expect unprecedented learning gaps due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Subsequent posts will go more in depth with several of these structures. As always, consider reaching out to your math coach to learn more about planning and implementing any scaffolding strategy you would like to add to your toolbox.
Facilitating Questions: Plan scaffolding questions ahead of time and only use when needed. Questions should build on current knowledge to reach grade-level competence. Anticipate possible misunderstandings and gaps in knowledge, but don’t assume that they exist. EM4 provides many examples of questions for scaffolding lessons.
Ex: What do you already know that may help you?
Chunking: What do you notice about these word problems? How are they presented differently? Presenting problems as listed sentences and removing the numbers is a scaffolding structure can be called chunking. This structure allows students to focus and comprehend the important information in the word problem. The breaking apart of key information into pieces can reduce cognitive load, make work more doable, and create a sense of accomplishment as the student reaches small goals. Bar modes can then be built to provide a visual aid (another scaffolding strategy) with these “chunks” of information in order to understand the operation(s) that is used to calculate the answer.
Think Alouds: You can model how you monitor your thinking about a task or problem by sharing all of your thinking aloud. Students should then be asked to follow the same process. The Think Aloud should help students to break apart the problem into steps, share what they notice, and then make and justify their plan for solving the problem.
Notice and Wonder: This routine provides every student the opportunity to share what they notice or wonder when provided a task. This open-ended activity allows all students to respond. Teachers can ask clarifying questions while they also praise and validate all responses. Students could also think-pair-share prior to sharing in whole group.
Providing Worked Examples: Providing students with an example(s) of a worked problem for easy reference is another useful scaffolding structure. A worked example helps to activate prior knowledge while also allowing students the opportunity to focus on the new concept being presented. Students reference this as needed and hopefully as time passes will rely on it less and less. These examples can also include visual aids and models, examples, non-examples, as well as key vocabulary.
Collaboration and Group Discussion: When students talk about math, they deepen their understanding. Provide daily opportunities for students to work in small groups as well as turn and talk. The opportunity to connect math and language benefits all students. You may need to provide sentence frames to help guide the discussion. This is especially beneficial for ELL students.
The seven structures listed above are just a few examples of the various ways you can scaffold your math instruction. Hopefully, many are already familiar and in use in your classroom. We encourage you to share a comment on what structures you use in your classroom that others may benefit from reading as well. Look for additional posts in which we elaborate on several of these structures with videos and additional examples.
Sources: ASCD, Edutopia, Math Solutions, Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
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