Scaffolded Instruction

A common and effective strategy for helping students develop their higher order thinking skills is scaffolding. My own first exposure to scaffolding in education came when I was attending a high school where there was some construction in progress. The workers had erected a series of temporary structures (called scaffolding), which permitted the workers to carry out their work in high places. When the work was finished, the scaffolding was removed. The term scaffolding has been developed as a useful metaphor for an effective method for helping students develop their thinking skills. The teacher, the textual materials, or other students provide temporary support (like scaffolding in the construction industry) to help students bridge the gap between their current abilities and the intended goal. Scaffolds can be tools, such as written guidelines or cue cards, or techniques, such as modeling or prompting by the teacher. Like the physical structures supporting construction around my high school, instructional scaffolding is temporary and adjustable. As students demonstrate greater proficiency on their own, the scaffolding is gradually removed. Table 12.3 summarizes the steps included in a typical scaffolding strategy (Rosenshine & Meister, 1992).

Table 12.3. Steps in Scaffolded Instruction of Thinking Skills (Based on Rosenshine & Meister, 1992). 1. Present the new cognitive strategy a. Introduce the concrete prompt. b. Model the skill. c. Think out loud while you or the students make decisions.   2. Regulate difficulty during guided practice. a. Start with simplified material and gradually increase the complexity of the task. b. Complete part of the task for the student. c. Provide cue cards. d. Present the material in small steps. e. Anticipate student errors and areas of difficulty and have supplemental lessons and prompts ready.   3. Provide varying contexts for student practice. a. Provide teacher-led practice. b. Engage in reciprocal teaching. c. Have students work in small groups.   4. Provide feedback. a. Offer teacher-led feedback. b. Provide checklists. c. Provide models of expert work.   5. Increase student responsibility. a. Diminish prompts and models. b. Gradually increase complexity and difficulty of material. c. Diminish student support. d. Practice consolidation - putting all the steps together. e. Check for student mastery.   6. Provide independent practice. a. Provide extensive practice. b. Facilitate application to new situations.

As Table 12.3 shows, the teacher typically begins the scaffolding process by communicating to the students the nature of a strategy that will be effective for a particular purpose. (This strategy is likely to be one of the skills described earlier in this chapter.) Good ways to introduce a strategy to students include demonstrating or explaining a prompt, modeling the skill, or thinking aloud while performing a task that applies the strategy. Various writers have developed prompts that are useful for particular thinking skills, such as summarizing (Taylor, 1985), asking questions to promote reading comprehension (King, 1991), solving difficult problems in mathematics (Schoenfeld, 1985), and planning a composition (Scardamalia, Bereiter, and Steinbach, 1984).

The next step is for the student to practice the strategy while the teacher manages the level of difficulty. For example, to teach a five-step thinking strategy, the teacher might try any of the following methods:

1. Begin by modeling all but the final step in the application of the strategy, and then gradually requiring the student to perform more of these steps.
   
   
2. Ask the student to name each step for the teacher to model.
   
   
3. Provide cue cards to prompt the student to perform each step.
   
   
4. Start with easy problems to which the strategy can be applied and then move to more difficult problems.

The idea is to provide the support necessary to enable the student to meet with continuous success.

The third step is to vary the context in which the student can practice the strategy. As Table 12.3 indicates, three basic contexts are (1) teacher-led practice, (2) reciprocal teaching, and (3) small group sessions. An important component of these practice sessions is the opportunity for the students to verbalize what they are doing. It is more likely that students will generalize strategies if they are able to label the steps; this will enable them to encode the information about the strategy in a more meaningful manner and thereby enable the learner to retrieve it more easily for later applications. In addition, verbalizing the information often exposes misconceptions and enables the students to expand the limits of their understanding of the process. In addition to varying the audience with whom the learner practices a strategy, it is useful to vary the content of the problems, so that the learner masters a general thinking strategy rather than a mere algorithm for solving a specific type of problem.

The fourth step is to provide feedback. This feedback can come from the teacher and from other students; but it is also useful to enable the students to give feedback to themselves by realizing that a strategy has been effective. One good way to stimulate self-reinforcement is to have the students use checklists to evaluate their own performance. Another possibility is to provide expert models; for example, after asking a set of questions about a reading passage, the student could compare this set to those developed by the textbook author or by the teacher.

There are several crucial features in effective scaffolded instruction:

1. As students become increasingly proficient at a strategy, it is important to increase student responsibility for its successful application (Greenfield, 1984). For example, the teacher may reduce prompts or provide more difficult problems. The teacher shifts from the role of a coach to the role of a sympathetic audience (Palinscar and Brown, 1984). The active role of the teacher diminishes as that of the student increases.
   
   
2. It is important to avoid simply making the task easier. The idea is to give the learner increasing responsibility for performing an important task - not to alter or water down the ultimate task so that the child can appear to be successful.
   
   
3. Scaffolding should help the learner accomplish a goal beyond simply imitating the activity of the skilled partner. That is, the learner should come to a solid understanding or demonstrate attainment of skills at the higher levels of Bloom's taxonomy (discussed in Chapter 3).
   
   
4. Finally, it is important to provide opportunities for independent practice and generalization. It is necessary for the learner to develop an intuitive insight regarding when it is appropriate to apply the strategy. Teachers can supply guidance with the "Remember when... Now Let's" Rule: "Remember when we asked questions and summarized in our reading class. Now let's try that here in social studies class. What should we do first?"

The preceding paragraphs have described a narrow range of examples of scaffolding. There are many other approaches to scaffolding. Reciprocal teaching (described in the Reading section of Chapter 16) is one way to provide scaffolding of such thinking skills as summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting (Palinscar & Brown, 1984). In addition, Pressley et al. (1992) recommend a strategy in which the scaffolding includes significantly more direct instruction by the teacher. Also note that scaffolding often occurs in natural settings. Vygotsky (1978) has pointed out that children often first experience a set of cognitive activities in the presence of experts (parents, peers, or coaches), and only gradually learn to perform these activities by themselves.

Cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989) is a strategy that uses scaffolding to teach complex cognitive skills. The metaphor is that skills in such areas as language and mathematics can be learned in much the same way that young apprentices would learn skills of various trades from a master at that craft.

Introduction to Vicarious Learning
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