Scaffolding Formative Feedback
The strategy of scaffolding learning supports building knowledge through access to practice and feedback. Designing low- and no-stakes learning activities where learners can reflect on mistakes and correct them helps learners mitigate identity threat and focus on reaching learning goals. Educators can build in flexibility in marking schemes so that students are assessed on their best performance as it relates to the course outcomes, and not penalized for previous failures (Verschelden, 2017). Scaffolding is especially important in the online environment, as in-the-moment coaching that can occur in face-to-face contexts and the cues that invite this type of ad hoc mentoring are not available. Some examples of scaffolding strategies that can be applied in any learning context, including online learning, include:
- building connections to prior understanding and experiences
- accentuating important information and how it relates to the learning goal
- supporting the process of meaning-making through models and feedback
- applying learning to new contexts
A short presentation on scaffolding.
Scaffolding A Lesson
>> Welcome to what I hope will be a short presentation on the role of instructional scaffolding as a way of achieving an inclusive classroom. We'll look at what instructional scaffolding is, how to scaffold the lesson, how that instruction supports an assessment, and other things that can be scaffolded in your course.
To begin with, have a look at these two pictures. What do you notice? On the left, we see a building that's being renovated or rebuilt. On the right, we see the flying buttresses of a gothic cathedral somewhere in Europe. If you look closely, however, you'll note that the structures on the right support the walls of the cathedral. Take them away and the whole structure collapses. They are therefore a permanent part of the building. The scaffolding on the left, however, is temporary and is designed to be removed. Once the architect has determined that the wall can stand on its own, the scaffolding can be taken away.
Teaching is sort of like this. As teachers, we have to recognize that sometimes our students will require supports that allow them to learn, any supports could take the form of screen readers or even eyeglasses. We also have to develop our own skills and figuring out when it's a good time to remove the temporary structures that assist learning in order for the students to learn and problem solve on their own. Instructional scaffolding then can be defined as providing temporary support for learning and it implies a gradual removal or fading of the support. The goal, once again, is to help the development of independent practice. As teachers, we know that we want our students to become experts from the learning. That is, we teach them to become expert accountants, chefs or writers, but teaching them to become expert learners is different. Here, they learn how to learn, how to strategize about how they learn, how they learn best, and for instance, how to problem solve on their own.
There are three steps to instructional scaffolding, modelling the strategy, guiding the practice, and providing some time for independent practice. The first step requires you as the teacher to select a problem that you'll work through, demonstrating the process in front of the class. The second step is where you select another problem and guide the whole class through the process. This is when students might practice in small groups or on their own with more examples. Here's where the teacher checks in with the students to make sure they're on the right track. And step three, students work on their own while the teacher provides more formative feedback on the work. Based on this feedback, teachers and students can make decisions about how quickly or slowly to proceed. Is progress being made? Maybe some more time needs to be spent on one aspect of the task. Maybe a different set of problems or activities might help move the learner towards the goals of the lesson.
It might help us to understand the process if we put in the context of breaking down a larger summative assessment like writing a report or an essay. No scaffolding here doesn't mean that the teachers have to write an essay or report in front of their classes. But perhaps one learning goal is to have students develop a working thesis statement for comparative essay. The teacher will work through the three steps, model, guide and allow for independent practice with the learners. Now, obviously, this particular lesson might take more than one class to move through the steps. And the goal of developing an effective thesis statement might be something that students continue to work on their own over a number of weeks. Then follow the same process with the other elements of the essay writing process.
Obviously, this is just an example and the actual elements might differ in each course. Scaffolding can be used to develop other elements in a course. If you're teaching online, social presence might be something that also gets scaffolded. As a teacher, you'll want to demonstrate how to respond to discussion prompts and how to reply to other learners in a discussion form. Learning activities can also be scaffolded. An active learning classroom might not be familiar to a lot of our students. So start off small with less complex activities such as think parent share before moving to more complex ones like a jigsaw. Whether you teach online or not, you might want to consider the scaffolding, the use of technology in your teaching. Sometimes we overestimate how tech savvy our students are and it's always a good idea to gradually introduce tech tools with lots of support at first before introducing more complex features or other tools later on.
Like so much about UDL, scaffolding is something you probably already do. Your courses are already evidence of this. We accomplish learning goals associated with lower level thinking skills at the beginning of the course and more complex tasks that require higher order thinking skills later on in the course. Similarly, we don't have a final exam or a summative assessment in week two or three of the semester for some very good reason. The point here is that you want to try to make scaffolding a part of your intentional practice. Think about how much support your students will need at different times in the course. I like to think about our courses as stories or narratives. And scaffolding provides that structure. The learning outcomes, activities and assessments provide the plot development. And our learners are the protagonists. Thank you for listening. Good luck.
Scaffolding a Lesson - Runtime 5:29 min
https://youtu.be/rJXPb0Pguqg
In "Linking Formative Assessment to Scaffolding," Lorie A. Shepard (2005) discusses learning theory behind both formative assessment and scaffolding:
“Scaffolding Online Student Success" (2019) (Word Count: 1,100).
In this same article, you’ll find a section that discusses the potential of formative assessment to “reconstruct the teaching contract” by promoting the aim to “encourage peer assessment, regard errors as opportunities for learning [and] focus on learning rather than on grades” (ibid.). For learners who are accustomed to competition, rely on being directed, and have previously been taught there are only right and wrong answers, this can represent a profoundly transformative learning experience.
In the world of online teaching, the immediate responses that we rely on in a conventional classroom setting aren’t always present. We must design our curriculum and learning spaces to account for this. Formative feedback is most effective when it is deliberate and frequent.
The ultimate goal of the Representation principle is to empower and support students to become “resourceful, knowledgeable learners” by providing information and content in multiple modalities and cultural perspectives, guiding learners to reflect and identify what works best for them given their experience with the content, the particular learning context, and their individual, variably perceptive brains.