Citation

Clark, Kathleen F., Graves, Michael F. (2002). Scaffolding students' comprehension of text. The Reading Teacher, 58 (6), 570-580.

Summary

The article that I read extolled the excellence of using scaffolding as an instructional technique. The article was quick to point to research which supported the effectiveness of scaffolding leading to comprehension, but lamented the fact that research supports findings which state that very few teachers use the scaffolding process. The definition of scaffolding has been molded over the years, but at its core, scaffolding is when teachers assist students in completing tasks that would normally be outside the student's ability and equips students to better be able to complete similar tasks in the future. Scaffolding finds its foundation in Vygotsky's social constructionist view of learning, a theory that states that all childhood development relates to a more experienced person coming alongside and assisting the child to complete the task.

Clark and Graves examine three different types of scaffolding within the article: moment-to-moment verbal scaffolding, providing instructional frameworks that foster content learning, and providing instructional procedures for teaching reading comprehension strategies.

Moment-to-moment verbal scaffolding involves prompting students with probing, thoughtful questions, and guiding student discussion towards the content objective. This is an excellent way to check student understanding and steer students towards filling in the gaps where knowledge may be lacking.

When teachers provide instructional frameworks which foster content learning, they typically design the lesson to promote experiences that students can profit from in terms of learning key objectives. Teachers may prompt students to question the author, relate certain events from the text to their own lives, activate prior knowledge, read passages aloud, write responsively, or act out certain scenes from the texts. There are many different types of instructional framework, each with its own merit considering the text being studied.

Reading comprehension strategies include teachers directly explaining the reading strategy (predicting), modeling prediction strategies for students, collaborative work on predicting as a class, guided practice, and finally independent student use of the prediction strategy. This can be accomplished with any reading comprehension strategy that the teacher wishes to instruct his students on. The progression from teacher involvement to independent work is gradual, but research has proven it to be effective.

Clark and Graves conclude by emphasizing the importance of scaffolding and reiterating that the instructional strategy is adaptable and flexible, but can be extremely effective within any classroom.

Application

The number of instructional strategies explained in this short article was fairly overwhelming. In examining how I teach now, I would say the scaffolding method I use most commonly would be the moment-to-moment type. I love to promote discussion and always try to guide the discussion back to my learning objectives for the day; sometimes this method fails when my students refuse to discuss a topic, while at other times it is very successful. One thing I want to do more of is employ the use of more pre-reading and during reading instructional strategies. I like the KWL model and want to use that when it comes to some of my bigger units of instruction. This would be a great way to know which areas of instruction to focus time, and it would also force students to recall information that they have already learned. All in all, I think employing pre-reading strategies would allow me to most effectively know which supports to give my students in future lessons.