Christine Bryk's List: Scaffolding

• Level 1: Environmental provisions (classroom organization, artifacts such as blocks)
         Level 2: Explaining, reviewing and restructuring
         Level 3: Developing conceptual thinking
• Teachers may sometimes be concerned that incorrect meanings will be spread among students, but research has shown that learning improves when errors and misconceptions are exposed and discussed, Anghileri says.

• The original notion of scaffolding assumed that a single more knowledgeable person, such as a parent or a teacher, helps individual learners, providing them with exactly the support they need to move forward (e.g., Bruner, 1975; Wood et al., 1976). One of the most critical aspects of scaffolding is the role of the adult or the expert. The expert is knowledgeable about the content of instruction as well as a facilitator with the skills, strategies and processes required for teaching. The expert not only helps motivate learners by providing just enough support to enable them to accomplish the goal, but also provides support in the form of modeling, highlighting the critical features of the task, and providing hints and questions that might help learners to reflect (Wood et al., 1976). In this conception then, the adult's role has perceptual and cognitive as well as affective components (Stone, 1998).
• parent-child interactions (Bruner, 1975) or in teacher-student interactions, focused on situations that allowed for one-on-one interactions between the adult or the expert and the learner.

• This learning process should never be in place permanently. Eventually, the goal should be for the student to no longer need the instructional scaffolding.
• Scaffolding represents the helpful interactions between adult and child that enable the child to do something beyond his or her independent efforts. A scaffold is a temporary framework that is put up for support and access to meaning and taken away as needed when the child secures control of success with a task.
• A construct that is critical for scaffolding instruction is Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Zone of proximal development is that field between what a learner can do by himself (expert stage) and what can be achieved with the support of a knowledgeable peer or instructor (pedagogical stage) (Ellis & Worthington, 1994).
• According to Saye and Brush, there are two levels of scaffolding: soft and hard (2002). An example of soft scaffolding in the classroom would be when a teacher circulates the room and converses with his or her students (Simon and Klein, 2007).
• In contrast with contingent or soft scaffolding, embedded or hard scaffolding is planned in advance to help students with a learning task that is known in advance to be difficult (Saye and Brush, 2002).

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• scaffolding refers to a variety of instructional techniques used to move students progressively toward stronger understanding and, ultimately, greater independence in the learning process.
• Scaffolding is widely considered to be an essential element of effective teaching, and all teachers—to a greater or lesser extent—almost certainly use various forms of instructional scaffolding in their teaching.
• scaffolding is often used to bridge learning gaps—i.e., the difference between what students have learned and what they are expected to know and be able to do
• main goals of scaffolding is to reduce the negative emotions and self-perceptions that students may experience when they get frustrated, intimidated, or discouraged when attempting a difficult task without the assistance, direction, or understanding they need to complete it.
• scaffold instruction, they typically break up a learning experience, concept, or skill into discrete parts, and then give students the assistance they need to learn each part.
• differentiate instruction, they might give some students an entirely different reading (to better match their reading level and ability), give the entire class the option to choose from among several texts (so each student can pick the one that interests them most), or give the class several options for completing a related assignment

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• Scaffolding is breaking up the learning into chunks and then providing a tool, or structure, with each chunk.
• differentiation, you may give a child an entirely different piece of text to read, you might shorten the text or alter it, and you may modify the writing assignment that follows.
• scaffolding is what you do first with kids,
• appropriately scaffold a lesson, or differentiate instruction, you have to know the individual and collective zone of proximal development (ZPD) of your learners. (As education researcher Eileen Raymond states, "[T]he ZPD is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance.")

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