After being inspired by Emma Herrod, and Jason Renshaw’s posts around showing our board work, I decided to try and capture my attempts at purposefully scaffolding.

First, a quick explanation: This foray into scaffolding came about after two of my students in a five person class nearly failed their month end evaluation. I started to do some action research to try and gather some strategies for dealing with mixed ability ESL groups, and I came across Scaffolding and Differentiated instruction.

Also, I came across a few blog entries: Scaffolding via Do Some Thinking blog, and S Is For Scaffolding (also via Do Some Thinking)

What I took from what I learned: 1) Scaffolding is great for helping students build on a skill that they are learning. (Grammar, vocabulary, important phrases etc.) When done correctly, scaffolding provides a support structure for students to succeed.

2) Scaffolding is repeated until students are able to roll with the afore mentioned skills – but it should fade over time. I share English Raven’s view on there being the possibility of too much artificial support that it can actually get in the way of learning over time.

So with that said, the scaffolding that I tried on in my last class, was to provide some target language on the white board. I simply wrote out a few context examples of how to use the “Useful language” chunks from our course book. (My two weakest students were having a tough time with using them.)

I didn’t throw all the answers out, but simply provided a rough foot path for the weaker ones to move through.

The Results:

1) Greater confidence – my weaker student’s change in confidence was remarkable. They were able to participate far more in the class, and often attempted to be the first ones to respond.

2) Less risk – Linked to #1, I think my weaker students felt far less risk to try out their ideas. They saw the language examples I put on the board, and were able to formulate their own applications of it. Because a few examples were there for them to see, I think they felt less intimidated. (In previous sessions, they were mostly silent. Or participated less.)

3) More Successes - Best of all, I noticed that my weaker students were able to successfully produce more of our target language for the day. (Which is a great thing!)

Moving forward:

1) I will do it again. I really liked seeing the difference in how my students were able to participate. (And I think they liked it even more.) Engagement was high.

2)  Keeping in mind English Raven’s and Scott Thornbury’s points: I will fade.

…What they seem to leave out – and what is so attractive (to me) about the metaphor of scaffolding – is the relinquishing of the teacher’s role as the learner appropriates the targeted skill… (Thornbury)

In subsequent classes, I will provide less and less on the white board for my students to work with as I see them take on the new language themselves. What I don’t want to do is create dependency on there ALWAYS being a “language walking cane” on the board for them.

So what I think scaffolding is: a very temporary support structure put in place by the teacher to help students reach, step into, and over time – OWN a new language skill.

I was going to show some pictures of my whiteboard, but I couldn’t get my camera to download my pictures. Next time I will use my BlackBerry.

(Photo credit: by takomabibelot)