When I first started teaching in the classroom, I thought I could just start teaching a concept and students would get it. Ha, that was definitely not the case for the majority of my students. Teaching at a Title 1 school required me to scaffold in every lesson to make it accessible for students to learn. A high percentage of students I worked with then and even students I work with now, tested below grade level. And not just one grade level below, but 3 or more levels behind.
I quickly learned that I needed to shift my teaching to match how my students needed to learn. And scaffolding is one of the main ways I accomplish this.
First, let’s talk about what scaffolding is in the construction world. Scaffolding is the temporary structures to assist workers during construction of a building.
In an academic sense, let’s think of the building as the learning. We want students to build learning and build understanding of different concepts.
We as teachers can help students by giving them structures to better access the learning.
The overall key is that scaffolding is meant to be temporary, not permanent. Eventually as the internal structure of the building is finished, the scaffolding will no longer be needed to access the learning. The learning may not be done YET, but the scaffolding isn’t needed for students to complete the understanding.
The goal of scaffolding is to move students progressively towards stronger understanding to ultimately gain independence in the learning process.
The majority of students I teach come from families who live in poverty. This changes how those students perform academically in a classroom. If you want to read more about how, Eric Jensen has two fabulous books Teaching with Poverty in Mind and Engaging Students with Poverty in Mind. You can watch an interview with him here!
As an 8th grade math teacher, my job is to prepare my students for high school math. Therefore, not only do I need to help fill in as many gaps as I can, but I need to help them continue to build on-grade level knowledge as well. It’s a balancing act what can work with the use of scaffolding, among other things.
Now that we’ve talked about what scaffolding is and why it’s used, what are the next steps?
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