6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use with Your Students

What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? It would be saying to students something like, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes -- no safety net, no parachute, no scaffolding -- just left blowing in the wind. Let's start by agreeing that scaffolding a lesson and differentiating instruction are two different things. Simply put, scaffolding is what you do first with kids, then for those students who are still struggling, you may need to differentiate by modifying an assignment and/or making accommodations for a student (for example, choose more accessible text and/or assign an alternative project). Scaffolding and differentiation do have something in common though. So let's get to some scaffolding strategies you may or may not have tried yet, or perhaps you've not used them in sometime and just need a gentle reminder on how awesome and helpful they can be when it comes to student learning: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Online learning: It's different The number of online educational offerings has exploded in recent years, but their rapid rise has spawned a critical question: Can such "virtual" classes cut through the maze of distractions -- such as email, the Internet, and television -- that face students sitting at their computers? The solution, Harvard researchers say, is to test students early and often. By interspersing online lectures with short tests, student mind-wandering decreased by half, note-taking tripled, and overall retention of the material improved, according to Daniel Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology, and Karl Szpunar, a postdoctoral fellow in psychology. Their findings are described in a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "What we hope this research does is show that we can use very strong, experimentally sound techniques to describe what works in online education and what doesn't," said Szpunar.

Study: It's not teacher, but method that matters | Teaching and Learning Excellence Seth Borenstein Who's better at teaching difficult physics to a class of more than 250 college students: the highly rated veteran professor using time-tested lecturing, or the inexperienced graduate students interacting with kids via devices that look like TV remotes? The answer could rattle ivy on college walls. A study by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, now a science adviser to President Barack Obama, suggests that how you teach is more important than who does the teaching. "It's really what's going on in the students' minds rather than who is instructing them," said lead researcher Carl Wieman of the University of British Columbia, who shared a Nobel physics prize in 2001. Previous research has produced similar results. Wieman heads the science education programs at both the University of British Columbia and the University of Colorado. A prominent proponent of the traditional physics teaching method declined to talk about the study.

NYU Study Examines Top High School Students’ Stress and Coping Mechanisms The study shows that there is growing awareness many subgroups of youth experience high levels of chronic stress, to the extent it impedes their abilities to succeed academically, compromises their mental health functioning, and fosters risk behavior. Furthermore, this chronic stress appears to persist into the college years, and researchers warns it may contribute to academic disengagement and mental health problems among emerging adults. Over time selective high schools have oriented themselves to address a context of increasingly competitive college admissions School work, college applications, extracurricular activities, and parental expectations all contribute to teenagers’ stress Youth, schools, and experts identified substance use as a common strategy for coping with stress According to Leonard academic, athletic, social, and personal challenges have been regarded as domains of “good stress” for high school aged youth. Substance use for this purpose was not gender specific. 1. 2.