Talking through the steps required for tasks and vocalising example phrases that you might use in your own writing shows students that a good response does not come automatically to anyone, but that it takes careful thought and planning - even for a teacher. Talking through your own thought processes as you complete a task is one of the most effective ways to demonstrate to students how you apply logic and prior learning to the crafting of a response. I find that this type of scaffolding is not only useful when introducing students to a new task, but also brilliant for revision. A checklist provides a visual prompt and gives students an idea of how many steps they need to take to be successful, as well as the order in which they should take them. Giving students a checklist of criteria to meet when answering a question or completing a task is a really simple way of scaffolding. If you can also share the success criteria for the task (in the form of a mark scheme, for example), this will be even more powerful.
#Strategies to scaffold learning how to#
By demonstrating how to answer a question or complete a particular piece of work prior to students attempting it for themselves, you make your requirements more explicit for every member of the class. Simply showing them what a good response should look like can be enormously helpful. Modelling outcomesįor some students, it can be a real challenge to conceptualise the expected outcome of a task.
Scaffolding reduces students’ cognitive load, allowing them to access and get to grips with unfamiliar tasks in the early stages of learning something new.īut what should effective scaffolding look like? Here are the three approaches that I find most useful. Learning needs to be built up slowly, starting with appropriate supports, which can then be systematically removed. Being able to provide your students with effective scaffolding is essential for their learning the idea of teaching a new topic to a student without putting the correct support in place is equivalent to building a house without foundations.
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