The Value of Scaffolding

The tasks a teacher presents to students must be appropriate for their level of development to maintain motivation and eventually move toward self-regulated learning. Work should be not too easy and not too hard, but just right. How capable students are of controlling their thoughts and actions links to their language ability. Students pick up and internalize the use of self-talk (or metacognition) to guide themselves through difficult tasks by first hearing adults around them model that language (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011). Students come to the classroom with huge differences in experience, background knowledge, ability, motivation, and availability to learn. Yet each day, teachers must figure out how to reach every student.

According to Vygotsky (1978), each student has an actual development level or what the student can do independently, and a potential development level or what the student can reach with capable instruction. He coined the term zone of proximal development to describe the space between those two levels (Vygotsky, 1978). Scaffolding is when a teacher provides temporary support to help a student perform a task that they are unable to complete on their own. The aim of this support is to bridge the gap between a student’s current ability and what the teacher requires in the classroom to help the student grow closer to working independently. When teachers use scaffolding, they are sending the message to students that they believe in their potential. In contrast to simplifying the content or making modifications, scaffolding provides the support that eventually allows the student to perform the skill on their own.

For example, a teacher may discover a high school student does not know how to do long division. The teacher may be tempted to give that student a calculator and show them how to use it for division problems. A calculator would allow the student to quickly get the correct answer, but it would take away the opportunity for that student to move from their current level of understanding to truly grasp what it means to divide. The student would not gain the tools needed to reason through a more complex problem involving division and would be out of luck in situations where a calculator is not allowed, like on certain standardized tests. Alternatively, the teacher can scaffold content beginning with very simple one-digit by two-digit long division problems and then working toward harder tasks. The teacher could scaffold the materials by helping the student create examples on cue cards and come up with acronyms that represent the steps (and the thinking process for each step) to solving a long division problem. After some practice, the teacher could gradually hand over responsibility for using the strategy to the student. Then the student could use the cue cards each time they do division until they can divide on their own without using the written thinking steps.

Students who continue to struggle even when the teacher scaffolds the instruction may need additional supports or accommodations (IRIS Center, 2020b). Students of all ability and skill levels need temporary scaffolds to stay motivated and persist when they are stretching themselves to try something new. When teachers provide a scaffold, they help students accomplish the task and may assist students in internalizing a model of thinking or strategy to help them with future tasks. Scaffolding allows a student to maintain motivation and develop the persistence necessary to move from being a teacher-dependent learner to a self-regulated learner (Smit, van Eerde, & Bakker, 2013).