Research Blog Post #4- Instructional Scaffolding

     In Chapter 4 of Rigor by Design, Not Chance by Karin Hess, she discusses ways to scaffold that will ensure that all students’ struggles are productive. Students need scaffolding in different forms in order to ensure that the student’s learning is in their zone of proximal development. Hess discusses four ways to scaffold:


  • Teacher and Peer Scaffolding: Teachers can provide supports to students when they are learning new concepts and those supports can be gradually removed. Teachers can create opportunities for students to challenge themselves and challenge their peers.

  • Content Scaffolding: Teachers can pre-teach important key ideas and they can give students basic background knowledge on content that will be taught in class. Scaffolding might include using additional resources such as videos and paired texts to give background knowledge.

  • Task Scaffolding: Teachers can break down multi-step tasks/directions into smaller and more manageable pieces. This allows students to practice smaller skills before tackling more complex and independent tasks.

  • Materials Scaffolding: Teachers can scaffold materials in order to help students uncover predictable patterns in texts or problem-solving contexts. Teachers can scaffold the texts they use for students.


Hess goes on to dive into how scaffolding choices are dependent on cognitive demand/load. Hess (2023) states that cognitive demand/load, “describes the range of mental processing required to complete a given task within a given context or scenario” (p.138). Scaffolding allows students who have a lower cognitive ability to access concepts and content being taught. She goes on to discuss that scaffolding can act as a bridge between students and content, allowing students to have better success in understanding content and attacking multi-step tasks. 


After reading this chapter of the text, I started to make more connections to what I have been learning during my experience in the special education master’s degree program. The IRIS Center is a resource that I have been using that has provided me with a lot of useful information about different concepts, including scaffolding. The specific module from this resource that connects to scaffolding discusses three of the four ways of scaffolding that Hess had mentioned. These three ways of scaffolding are:


  • Content Scaffolding

  • Task Scaffolding

  • Material Scaffolding

The IRIS Center’s ideas connect directly to Hess’s ideas of scaffolding and even expands upon them. Starting with content scaffolding, the IRIS Center introduces three techniques: use familiar or highly interesting content; use easy content; start with easy steps. “Using familiar or highly interesting content” creates an opportunity for students to be more engaged and motivated to learn. The next technique addressed is, “use easy content”. Hess (2023) states that, “Scaffolding doesn’t change the rigor of a task, but it can reduce the demands on a student’s working memory during learning” (p.137). When the IRIS Center talks about using “easy” content, they don’t mean that the content is not rigorous, it just means that teachers are scaffolding the content in a way that makes it accessible for students of all cognitive abilities. For example, scaffolding the content could mean using text in class that is below grade level in order to teach reading comprehension strategies. Once the comprehension strategy is mastered, teachers can gradually remove that support by increasing the text complexity level. This directly relates to Hess’s idea of scaffolding content by using a variety of different texts, including texts that may not be at grade level. The last technique addressed, “start with easy steps”, is another way that the IRIS Center connects to Hess’s ideas. Starting with easy steps is a technique that allows teachers to perform and model more difficult steps of a task while allowing students to tackle the easier steps. Over time, students will take responsibility for more tasks, more difficult ones. All three of these techniques scaffold content in a way that allows students to access the curriculum in their own zone of proximal development and the content complexity increases over time as students progress and master different strategies and concepts.

The Iris Center then addresses task scaffolding. The IRIS Center states, “Task scaffolding is quite straightforward: The teacher simply gives the students more and more responsibility for steps in a strategy or task”. Task scaffolding allows students to understand and master tasks and over time, tasks can be added for students to complete independently. It’s similar to a gradual release of responsibility in the way that teachers gradually give students more responsibility.

Lastly, the IRIS Center addresses material scaffolding. The IRIS Center states, “Material scaffolding involves the use of written prompts or cues to help the students perform a task or use a strategy”. Material scaffolding as described by the IRIS Center relates to Hess’s ideas because Hess talks about how scaffolded materials may include embedded visual cues. When I think of visual cues I think about how visual cues help students “perform a task or use a strategy”. For example, a teacher from the IRIS Center used the COPS strategy (capitalization, overall appearance, punctuation, spelling) and hung up a poster to help prompt students. This is a great way to scaffold because it is a resource that can be removed over time, as students master the general concept of “COPS”. I liked how Hess expanded on the concept of material scaffolding by stating that chunked texts can be a scaffolded material. This tells me that scaffolded materials are not just visual cues, but also can be longer, more in-depth resources that support student thinking.

Overall, I felt as though Hess did a great job of addressing why it is important to scaffold and she introduced different ways to scaffold, and then the IRIS Center went on to further explain scaffolding by explicitly talking about the different ways of scaffolding and how they can be used to better support students in their learning.


Resources:

Hess, K. (2023). Rigor by Design, Not Chance: Deeper Thinking Through Actionable Instruction and Assessment. ASCD.

IRIS Center. (n.d.). Providing Instructional Supports: Facilitating Mastery of New Skills. https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/module/sca/cresource/q2/p03/#content

Comments

  1. Dr. Beth Walsh-MoormanNovember 13, 2023 at 5:43 AM

    I appreciated the further explanation of the reasons for scaffolding because I thought Hess went through those quite quickly.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Katie GillespieNovember 16, 2023 at 6:25 AM

    Abby,
    I love that you connected this to your area of study, making it more meaningful for yourself. I resonate with the point you made about how teaching easier content in the beginning to master a skill is a part of scaffolding. By achieving the skill, you can then work on harder content by applying their previous knowledge. As the IRIS states, material scaffolding is something I use a lot in my classroom. I find it very helpful for my students to reference when completing independent work.
    Great post!

    ReplyDelete
  3. KathrynNovember 17, 2023 at 4:32 PM

    Abby, well done linking the information in this chapter to previous learning and real-life experience (great job expanding your mind map schema!) While engaging with the Iris Center material on scaffolding, it echoed why Hess has scaffolding on her list of 5 essential, evidence based techniques for building a supportive classroom culture for thinking/learning. Given that the goal is to meet students where they are, and provide the support they need to learn and grow a bit each day, it makes sense that teachers should scaffold content. Consider that the aim of content scaffolding is to engage students with: familiar/interesting, easy, and progressing from easy to more difficult. Though strategic scaffolding takes time and planning, I would argue that it would create more time for teachers as they may “waste” less instructional time managing situations where students are not engaged (because more students will have the materials that they can connect and engage with).

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