How Do I Provide Scaffolding for Learning?

Scaffolding is the process whereby instructors provide students with temporary supports to relieve some of the cognitive load, assisting students in focusing on particular dimensions of learning (Ambrose, et al., 2010). The end goal is to eventually remove those supports or reduce instructor guidance as students become more proficient and confident in their abilities to work independently to complete a task (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). There are many benefits of instructional scaffolding, including: 1) helping students develop mastery over key content and skills; 2) supporting students’ persistence in learning new content or completing a task; 3) assisting in getting students engaged and interested in the content or task; and 4) reducing feelings of frustration or confusion (Ambrose et al., 2010; van de Pol, Voman, & Beishuizen, 2010).  

Strategies & Examples

Integrate Scaffolding into Your Course Design

There is no prescribed process to follow for instructional scaffolding. However, the example sequence below offers a helpful framework to think about how you might support student learning in your courses (Office of Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching Transformation, n.d.). 

• Identify a challenging course concept, a complex assignment, or even an exam. If you’ve taught your course before, another option is to consider where students have struggled in the past (what’s called a bottleneck) and whether students needed additional support (Middledorf & Shopkow, 2017).
• Next, list all the steps, stages, or skills students will need to learn or practice to demonstrate proficiency.
• A helpful intermediary step would be to share this course concept, assignment, or exam with a colleague and talk through all the steps you identified. You may receive helpful feedback from your colleague about steps or skills you may have missed.
• Once you have your list, consider how you could integrate all of those steps, stages, and skills into your course design. You can do this by building in more time for practice or using some of the approaches in the following sections.

Scaffold Content

Scaffolding course content is critical to helping all students build deeper understanding of the material. A few approaches to scaffolding content include:

• Connect new content to prior knowledge. By connecting new content to what students already know—whether it be real-life examples or previous texts, lectures, or classes—you are giving students an organizing structure for the new material. Students can write out these connections, discuss them in class, or visually depict them using concept maps.
• Define critical (but unfamiliar) vocabulary. Before students read a new text, define specific words that might be challenging to students unfamiliar with the content. Some faculty choose to create, or have students collaboratively create, a “course glossary” of critical words that students can access while reading and completing assignments.
• Preview, Predict, then Process a Reading. Before students read a text for class, preview it by sharing the purpose of the reading and how it’s structured, or refer to any background knowledge students may have from previous lectures that will help them make sense of the text. While students read, encourage them to make predictions or connections or to pause to ask questions about the text to check for their understanding. You might have students share their predictions, connections, or questions in Canvas as an accountability step prior to coming to class. While in class, use discussion activities like Think-Pair-Share or Socratic Seminars to help students process what they read.
• Provide Structures. Graphic organizers make thinking visible by providing a visual structure to depict relationships, hierarchies, sequences or cause and effect. Skeleton notes or guided notes are particularly helpful during lectures, pointing students to where they should focus during the lecture and the main takeaways of the major concepts.

Scaffold Tasks

Scaffolding tasks or assignments helps to reduce the cognitive load involved in complex assignments and supports engagement. A few approaches to scaffolding tasks include:

• Model or Think Aloud. As the instructor, walk through the steps of a given problem or the sequence of tasks for a complex assignment. Periodically pause and explain your thinking about how you might go about completing the step or task or ask for students to suggest a next step to keep them engaged and thinking with you. By demonstrating your thought process in completing the task, you are demystifying the series of steps students often miss when they are just presented with a final product. You can also group students and have them model or think aloud to support each other in completing the task.
• Break It Down. If you assign a complex final project, consider breaking the project into discrete deliverables due at different times throughout the semester. For example, if you assign your students to write a literature review on a particular topic, the discrete deliverables might be: 1) a topic proposal and thesis statement; 2) annotated bibliography; 3) a draft outline of the lit review; 4) a first draft with a peer review; and 5) final draft of the lit review (Skene & Fedko, n.d.).
• Provide Structures. In addition to breaking down a complex assignment into discrete parts, checklists are also useful scaffolds in helping students reflect on whether they completed all of the steps for an assignment. Rubrics are also useful scaffolds to clarify the expectations of an assignment. You can view this resource on how to develop a rubric as well as a list of example rubrics.

Removing Scaffolds

Once students have practiced and become proficient in either understanding the content or completing the task independently, instructors can remove the instructional scaffolds. For example, if you used the “Break It Down” strategy from the section above for a literature review assignment (i.e., breaking down each step needed for a lit review and assigning discrete deliverables), perhaps for another project or assignment due later in the semester more of these planning and self-monitoring responsibilities are delegated to your students (Ambrose et al., 2010). This approach is what Middledorf and Shopkow (2017) call “unconscious” scaffolding over time, in that the scaffolding is not taken away, but the competencies students mastered (thesis statement development, research, outlining, etc.) become implicit.

Another example would be to adapt the “Think Aloud” strategy to model problem-solving. Instead of the instructor walking through all the steps, perhaps she begins the process, but asks another student to talk through step 2, and another student to talk through step 3, and so on until eventually the think aloud is no longer needed.

Formative assessments can be helpful during this time when you remove the scaffolding. These assessments can provide you and your students with feedback on what they know and where they may still be struggling, particularly when it comes to mastering particular skills or competencies. Assignment wrappers or exam wrappers encourage reflection that support building student skills and fostering engagement with course materials before or after students complete an assessment.

• Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching. John Wiley & Sons.
• Middendorf, J., & Shopkow, L. (2017). Overcoming student learning bottlenecks: Decode the critical thinking of your discipline. Taylor & Francis Group.
• Office of Curriculum, Assessment, and Teaching Transformation. (n.d.). Scaffolding content. University at Buffalo. Retrieved from https://www.buffalo.edu/catt/teach/develop/build/scaffolding.html
• Skene, A., & Fedko, S. (n.d.) Assignment scaffolding. Centre for Teaching & Learning at the University of Toronto. Retrieved from https://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/aca_facultywac/Workshops-AssignmentScaffolding-120412.pdf
• van de Pol, J., Volman, M. & Beishuizen, J. (2010). Scaffolding in Teacher–Student Interaction: A Decade of Research. Educational Psychology Review  22, 271–296 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9127-6
• Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100.