Chapter 2 in Amy Benjamin's But I'm not a Reading Teacher is titled Scaffolding Vocabulary Instruction. I have chosen to break this up into two parts because the reading is so absolutely RICH! This book is meant to build reading comprehension in students through strategies. We hear about these strategies all the time, but sometimes they're hard to digest all at once. So today's blog will focus on Scaffolding as a strategy. Next week I will dive into specific examples on how Amy Benjamin suggests scaffolding, along with my own experiences.
Scaffolding is a strategy that we have seen in action throughout our lives. It provides a support to do a task and then allowing the students to be able to do the task on their own. Lev Vygotsky originally came up with scaffolding, but never actually used the word. He coined the term Zone of Proximal Development. This theory tells us that when a skill is too difficult for a child to master, they can use the guidance and encouragement of a knowledgeable person. Which sounds very similar to each other.
"Scaffolding for reading instruction is not giving students the answers, doing the work for them, reading everything aloud for them, giving hints, or diluting the information, and leaving it at that" (Benjamin, 2007). Amy Benjamin makes an excellent point when it comes to this. Students will not find the confidence and empowerment to use the skills if you constantly give them the answers or walk them through everything. Scaffolding should be able to provide the appropriate cues to students to begin the reading process and derive meaning from the text.
With scaffolding, you don't just take the student and do all the work up to where you think they can handle the task. You build them up to the task. Some students may require verbal instruction, diagrams, hands on activities, and building background knowledge. So you can take a task, divide it into parts, guide on each individual task, and then have the students do the entire task all in one in the end. These small tasks should be boosting the student up and providing confidence as they proceed. Scaffolding is valuable in its own right when we consider that we only learn and absorb so much information at any given time. If we overload with information, students are more likely to check out and decide they do not want to move further. It causes them to feel discouraged. Scaffolding provides just enough information to keep them engaged and learning.
So tune in next time to go into much more detail on how we can put scaffolding into action in our classrooms!
I really connect with the scaffolding strategy in education. I definitely think that there is a struggle in a lot of classrooms with not overloading students. There are too many classrooms where the teacher lectures most of the time. There is a limited amount of hands on activities in a lot of core classrooms. And research has shown that there are so many different types of learners. I personally do not learn well by the lecturing method of teaching. I find it pretty hard to pay attention and the only way I really absorb anything is by literally writing down everything the teacher says. Versus hands on, which I am an artist and going to be an art teacher, which speaks to my best method of learning as well. And not only learning, but really absorbing and remembering what I learn. I know there are many others that have similar struggles, and scaffolding provides alternate ways of teaching.
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