Teachers talk a lot about scaffolding for student success, but teachers understand scaffolding in different ways. In my view, good scaffolds allow students to access material, ideas, and skills they might not otherwise have the skills or knowledge to access. However, scaffolds can also be an unnecessary crutch that over-structure and overdetermine students’ thinking. Over the last couple of years, my thinking around scaffolding for student success has changed in some substantial ways as I have spent time thinking not only about what culturally responsive scaffolding looks like but also what it means for students to carry the cognitive load.
A culturally responsive scaffold is one that helps students connect their lives to content and skills, or helps students to see how new content and skills is related to things they already know. Well done “hooks” to lessons or units of study are some of the most important scaffolds that teachers employ to engage students in the process of learning and to help students layer and connect new knowledge on top of and to existing knowledge. These “hooks” require knowledge of students’ interests, ideas, and knowledge, and ask students to surface them in order to build on them. In my experience, these are some of the most powerful scaffolds for students. All knowledge builds on existing knowledge, and when students can see how what they are learning about is related to them, their lives, and their communities, not only is it more “sticky” but also they are more engaged.
The most common scaffolds many teachers use are worksheets are graphic organizers that draw students’ attention to specific elements of a text, or skill. These are situationally useful, but they have the potential to transform learning from deep thinking, inquiry, exploration, and discovery to “fill in the boxes.” At my school over the past couple of years, we’ve done a lot of work around close reading in our disciplines, and the central insight of this work is that over-scaffolding engagement with a text not only doesn’t allow space for students to bring themselves and their ideas to a text, but it also doesn’t prepare students to be independent learners.
For example, let’s take guided reading questions (sometimes called text-dependent questions). In the past, I developed these questions frequently. I thought I was pretty good at writing them and figured that they were useful for assessing student text comprehension and directing the attention of students to the areas of the text that I judged were most important. However, if a student reads a text with a series of comprehension questions alongside it, the student is less authentically and cognitively engaged.
When students are focusing on the particular elements of the text that the teacher has decided are important, they are not developing the skill of identifying important areas of the text themselves. The teacher is thus carrying more of the cognitive load for students. This may be useful with an especially complex text where a scaffold is useful to clue students into a particular insight or idea, but in the long run with overuse, it develops dependent readers. In the long run, we want students to be able to identify key elements of a text on their own and justify why those elements are important, so why don’t we help them build the skills to do that by removing the overused scaffold of text-dependent questions and guiding them through a process of deeper engagement with the reading where they develop and answer their own questions about a text?
The best text-dependent questions will ask students to make connections from the text to their lives, but even still the teacher is directing the engagement with the text. The questions don’t create space for students to engage with the text at their own level or with the particular dimensions of the text that they believe are important. Instead of students discovering from the text, students “discover” via a scaffold provided by the teacher. Not only is this less authentic, but students have the capacity to discover and identify elements of the text that may have escaped a teacher’s attention, or to identify and analyze important elements of a text that a teacher may not have initially judged as important. When reading becomes student-directed, they own the process, carry the cognitive load, and self-direct. The results are not only more student-directed, but more interesting, because students surface their own unique ideas, and thus have more to contribute to a discussion of the text.
Now, you may be thinking: what if students aren’t picking up on the important elements they need to build a particular skill? For example, when reading texts as a historian, history teachers want students to key in on their origin, purpose, as well as possible values and limitations of the texts as an insight into a historical moment or trend. Thus, many teachers use organizers that ask students to identify each of these elements, with some questions that guide students towards correct answers. There is value in this, but students also need to be released from these scaffolds after they’ve had a chance to acquire some of these skills in order to mount their own independent investigations of texts.