Podcast: Smart Strategies to Improve Your Scaffolding

Getting scaffolding right—amid the messy reality of teaching 30+ students at different skill levels—is one of the toughest challenges in teaching. 

Done well, it looks like tactical magic: teachers seamlessly know how and when to support kids, then step back at just the right moment, building independence by removing the training wheels.

In this episode of School of Practice, we get into it with Beck Alber, a former high school ELA teacher and UCLA School of Education mentor teacher. She unpacks the evidence-based essentials of smart, timely scaffolding—both for new teachers, as well as classroom veterans (have you changed up your routines lately? No? Alber’s got suggestions for that). We’ll chat about how to determine if your scaffolds are working, what to do if they’re not, and what a strong scaffolding toolbox looks like. 

Related resources:

• 6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use With Your Students Support every student by breaking learning up into chunks and providing a concrete structure for each.
• Empowering Middle School Students to Create Their Own Scaffolds By shifting the responsibility of scaffolding to students, teachers can help them be prepared to take ownership of their learning process.
• Scaffolding Like a Pro: Powerful Ways to Support Learning With options ranging from tried-and-true to lesser-known, these strategies for cognitive, metacognitive, and procedural scaffolding will help you set students up for success.
• 6 Foundational Ways to Scaffold Student Learning A collection of evidence-backed tips to help students cross the bridge from confusion to clarity.
• Frayer Model (downloadable) This one-page guide, created by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, also includes a downloadable graphic organizer.
• Fishbowl Method (downloadable) This step-by-step guide was created by elementary school teacher Chris Opitz and shared with Edutopia.
• 60-Second Strategy: Fishbowl Discussion (video) A discussion technique based on peer feedback helps students delve into complex texts and develop communication skills.
• Choosing Words to Teach An excerpt from Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and Linda Kucan’s influential book about how to teach vocabulary, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction.
• Research: Benefits of Interactive Graphic Organizers in Online Learning: Evidence for Generative Learning Theory (2021) Researchers found that graphic organizers helped middle school students learn better from text than reading text alone. Students using interactive organizers showed especially deep processing and engagement, suggesting that these tools can reduce cognitive load and improve both comprehension and retention.
• Research: The Early History of the Scaffolding Metaphor: Bernstein, Luria, Vygotsky, and Before (2019) This article traces the history of scaffolding in education back to Russian scholars who described how temporary supports help new skills develop before becoming internalized.