Teach Primary 18.8

SA T S S P E C I A L www.teachwire.net | 69 Adam Kohlbeck turns the common perception of scaffolding on its head... Take it down, OR BUILD IT UP? S caffolding is a tried-and-tested part of every effective teacher’s toolkit. It’s more formally known as: 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 and providing support such as prompting questions or writing frame s. To us mere teaching mortals, it's the journey from teacher-led learning to pupil-led learning through gently adding and then removing levels of support – a bit like using stabilisers on a child’s bike. Flipping it round? As with stabilisers, scaffolding is usually presented as something that should be gradually removed. Yet there are scenarios in which building scaffolding up incrementally actually serves learning better. When problems are presented to pupils with scaffolding, we are allowing every child the opportunity to access the learning by directing them to think about the structure of the problem in a certain way. For example, suppose we present children with Table 1, which shows the cost of fruit at a school Adam Kohlbeck (FCCT FCMI) is a deputy headteacher, advisor to National Institute of Teaching and Learning and regular contributor to Testbase educational blogs. testbase.co.uk cafeteria, and 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. Fruit Cost for one banana 12p plum 23p apple 32p pear 38p Table 1. 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 Table 2. £2 £1.50 50p Table 2. 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 suggest that teachers 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 the teacher unaware of how much scaffolding each pupil required, since all ‘struggling’ pupils received the same amount and design of scaffolding. This is problematic because expertise exists on a continuum, but with the approach described above, the teacher only knows who has the expertise to solve the problem independently and who does not. So, what can we do about this? Teachers can use a kind of reverse scaffolding whereby the problem is first presented without any scaffolding before it is incrementally increased, with opportunities to solve the problem given to pupils at each point. Let's 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 in Figure 1. This would give pupils the opportunity to solve the problem at each round. It 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 their approach to scaffolding in this way – building it up rather than taking it down – teachers can supercharge their classroom diagnosis understanding. The inferences they can make about understanding become more precise and responsive to current pupil understanding and needs. Game changing. TP Figure 1. “Scaffolding is usually presented as something that should be gradually removed”