Scaffolding

After reading “An Ethic of Excellence” I started to think deeper into the importance placed on scaffolding in Knowledge Building.

Before I read the book I thought to myself: But HOW do they encourage students towards excellence. How do they facilitate that ACTUAL building of knowledge through these inquires. How are the child’s ideas challenges and grown. How do teachers support students to think deeper and not simply be satisfied with where their learning is.

The answer is Scaffolding!

The term Scaffolding comes from Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of the Zone of Proximal Development. “The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance” (Vygotsky, 1978, 86).

Teachers can Scaffold students learning in a variety of ways including providing new information, asking questions, providing experiences that further thinking, providing materials, providing expert information, encouraging collaboration, encouraging students to look at their information in a  different way, encourage deeper observations, being curious, encourage revision, demonstrate or model, observe, summarizing, paraphrasing, give constructive feedback, provide advice on direction or next steps, encourage trial and error and encouragement that there is more to learn.

Here the role to the teacher is a co-researcher or a co-teacher. A critical friend… A support person in a students development. It is important that when scaffolding teachers are ensuring that that dont always directly give the information or answers to students. That the scaffold gives the students the prompt or tool to build their own learning. They then use that tool to evaluate what they already know and how it wither supports their knowledge or if it does not fit. Consider providing students a little “lift” so that they are able to see for themselves what is just above what is in front of them.

Watch this GREAT video on teaching Methods for Inspiring the Students of the Future by Joe Ruhl