Scaffolding for students with cognition and learning needs

RobClark,AssistantHeadteacherFGCS

The area of cognition and learning is the most common type of need for pupils on SEN support. According to the DfE (2017), 50% of secondary school pupils on SEN support had cognition and learning difficulties listed as their primary type of need.

“Scaffolding is a metaphor for temporary support that is removed when no longer required. It may be visual, verbal or written” (EEF, 2020).

This temporary assistance is provided for students so they can successfully complete tasks that they cannot yet do independently and with a high rate of success. Teachers select powerful visual, verbal and written supports; carefully calibrate them to students’ performance and understanding. Best practice is always when teachers use them flexibly, evaluate their effectiveness and gradually remove them once they are no longer needed. Some scaffolds are planned prior to the lesson and some are provided responsively during instruction (McLeskey et al, 2020).

Visual scaffolds

Visual scaffolds may support a pupil to know what equipment they need, the steps they need to take or what their work should look like. Examples of effective visual scaffolds include a task planner, story frames, a list of steps a pupil needs to take, model examples of work and images that support vocabulary learning.

Verbal scaffolds

Providing a verbal scaffolding may be reteaching a tricky concept to a group of pupils, or using questioning to identify and address any misconceptions. This may sound like the following: “Let’s look at this together.., “What have you done before that will help youwith this task” and “Don’t forget your work needs to include..”

Written scaffolds

A written scaffold will typically be provided for a pupil to sup port them with an independent written task. It could be the notes made from class discussion. It could even be the child’s own previous work. Further effective examples include, word banks, writing frames and sentence starters.

It is important to consider the cognitive load of our students with cognition and learning needs and the research suggests teachers should reduce the load of sensory information and its associated processing. Work by Dockrell and Shield (2006) using a randomised control design at classroom level has shown that children with SEN are more negatively impacted to a significant degree by the background babble of typical busy classroom environments. The most supportive practitioners will declutter their slides or curriculum booklets, chunk information, declutter classrooms and use standardised and predictable routines (EDI framework) for students.

Dockrell and Shield (2006) work also highlights the issue of sensory overload for students with additional needs. The noise conditions significantly impacted on verbal literacy task performance for children with SEN. Children of typical development also had difficulty in the background classroom noise condition. They performed worse in persistent babble conditions when doing non-verbal tasks but were less impacted on verbal ones, for example reading.

At the CST, we insist on golden silence during phase 4 (SLOP) and no split attention in order to reduce the redundancy effect during teacher talk (SLANT). These standardised routines alongside our intellectual preparation for scaffolding are essential to the success and progress of our SEND students.