Scaffolding in education – How to build up successive levels
Adam Kohlbeck turns the common perception of scaffolding on its head…
We usually understand scaffolding in education as something that we gradually remove, but is there a better way?
What is scaffolding in education?
Scaffolding is a tried-and-tested part of every effective teacher’s toolkit. It’s the process of making it easier for pupils to reach their learning goals by splitting up big development goals or tasks into several progressive stepping stones. It also involves providing support such as prompting questions or writing frames.
In simpler terms, scaffolding in education is the journey from teacher-led learning to pupil-led learning by gently adding and then removing levels of support. Think of it a bit like using stabilisers on a child’s bike.
Flipped scaffolding
As with stabilisers, scaffolding in education is usually presented as something that should be gradually removed. Yet there are scenarios in which the gradual building up of scaffolding actually serves learning better.
When we present problems to pupils with scaffolding, we allow every child the opportunity to access the learning by directing them to think about the structure of the problem in a certain way.
Example of scaffolding in education
For example, suppose we present children with the below table, which shows the cost of fruit at a school cafeteria:
| Fruit | Cost for one |
| banana | 12p |
| plum | 23p |
| apple | 32p |
| pear | 38p |
Ask them to work through the following problem:
Amir buys two pieces of fruit.
He pays with a £2 coin.
He gets £1.50 change.
Tick the two pieces of fruit that Amir buys.
With an approach that aims to put scaffolding in place to be later removed for other similar problems, we might present pupils with a visual representation of the problem using a similar bar model as shown in the below table:
Scaffolding in this way allows more pupils access to the question by a kind of working memory outsourcing effect.
Instead of the pupils having to build the structure of the problem in their working memory, the construction piece of work is being done by the scaffold. This frees up more cognitive resources to work through to the solution.
This is a really useful scaffold for lots of pupils. But equally, and perhaps crucially, it could be seen as counter-productive to some – specifically pupils who could have solved it with less scaffolding.
These pupils would have benefited from having to think harder about their own strategy to the solution as well as the calculation.
Testing understanding
The other opportunity that is missed here is that teachers don’t know which pupils understood the problem without the scaffold.
Of course, you could first present the problem without the scaffold and then add it in if pupils can’t solve it.
This is certainly a better approach, but it still leaves you unaware of how much scaffolding each pupil requires, since all ‘struggling’ pupils receive the same amount and design of scaffolding.
This is problematic because expertise exists on a continuum. With the approach described above, we only know who has the expertise to solve the problem independently and who does not.
Using reverse scaffolding
So, what can we do about this? We can use a kind of reverse scaffolding whereby we first present the problem without any scaffolding before incrementally increasing it, giving pupils the opportunity to solve the problem at each point.
Consider the following problem:
Terry, Jane and Nimrat are having a jumping competition. Terry jumps 2 metres further than Jane and Jane jumps 2 metres further than Nirmat. Altogether, they jump 9.36 metres. How far does each person jump?
With this question, you could build up successive levels of scaffolding, as shown below.
This would give pupils the opportunity to solve the problem at each round. This would also enable you to see who can access the problem at each point, and where issues of understanding begin for each pupil.
By structuring your approach to scaffolding in this way – building it up rather than taking it down – you can supercharge your classroom diagnosis understanding.
The inferences you can make about understanding become more precise, and responsive to current pupil understanding and needs.
Adam Kohlbeck (FCCT FCMI) is a deputy headteacher, advisor to the National Institute of Teaching and Learning and regular contributor to Testbase educational blogs.
