We know what scaffolding is in general. We've all seen them on the walls of buildings being constructed. In education scaffolding uses temporary supports to move students progressively towards stronger understanding. And ultimately greater independence, in the learning process. Scaffolds are removed over time as students become more proficient, just as when the building is done, the scaffolding is taken down. Teachers provide scaffolding to help students take the next step in their learning. That's just beyond what they can do on their own. What've you got, Ski called the zone of proximal development. With scaffolding teachers make explicit connections between what students already know and what is new learning for them. While scaffolding is a core teaching strategy for all students, skillful scaffolding is particularly important for students who struggle with learning. It can enable them to engage successfully with grade level content, which is essential to providing equitable outcomes for all students. For example, we want to teach are reluctant writers to revise their writing. Most will need help to start before they'll be able to do it effectively on their own. There are many methods to help support the teaching of revision, but one of them, you might be familiar with is star. First, we might want to teach students that revision and editing are two separate tasks. They are not the same thing. Revision deals with larger issues of content and organization, editing deals with narrower issues of words, sentences and grammar. The way I once heard a writer described, the difference is this way. Editing is the process of correcting mistakes. Revision is the process of adding virtues. One such method for revision, that you might be familiar with is the star method. It's an acronym to think about active revision strategies and the four tasks related to star substitute, takeout, add and rearrange. When we talk about substituting, it could be substituting strong verbs for weak ones, substituting fresher words for overused words. Strong adjectives for weak ones could be working on the sentence and word level, and this would still be revision, not editing. Because you're not correcting the errors, you are looking for ways to improve the clarity, precision and value of the words that you're using. Is there another way to say this? What if you were explaining it to your friend, take a particularly challenging paragraph and break it down into a list. What is being said in what order. So with substituting, you've already said it, and what you're looking to to find out is, is there a way to say it better? When we talk about taking out, could be taking out unnecessary repetition, unnecessary words with particularly worthy writers, I sometimes suggest that they tried taking out 10% of the words from their piece and see what they think. You can also teach as a mini lesson perhaps what to look for, when students are strengthening the writing. Sentence combining, conjunctions words to look forward to cut verbs are on important information parts that may belong in another part or another piece. Does this really fit the topic? Do you need this? In my experience, the majority of students tend to underwrite especially reluctant writers. But there will be some students who write much more than they need, and even reluctant writers sometimes have parts that they might want to take out. The third task is adding, you might add detailed descriptions, new information, figurative language, clarification, development, meaning, ask questions. What was that like? What were you thinking at that moment about how old was that person? What did they look like? Could you give an example of what you mean here? Is there another way to think about this? Adding, is generally and again, particularly for reluctant writers, is likely to be the area that, is most helpful for them to focus on. In one of the many lessons we looked at, Barry Lanes exercise and asking questions. And that's a an exercise that could help students add, by having students ask questions about things they would want to know more about in specific places in the students writing. And then the fourth task is to rearrange, rearrange the order of the paragraphs or lines or sentences to make the peace more interesting are understandable. More logic. Sometimes it's good to type up the sentences of student writing and cut them into strips to physically move them around to play with the order. You can also do a reverse outline, which is to outline the peace after you wrote it. What's the main idea of each paragraph and you get to see just in a few sentences what the structure is, and then see what happens if you move them around. That's the idea behind the exercise of, cutting your sentences or your paragraphs into strips and laying them out because you can then move them around. And see the effect of what happens when you change the order. How can you use this method as a scaffold for reluctant writers? Well, the first step is to model it, create your own writing, but make it underwritten. Kind of like what Barry Lane did in his story, okay? Provide the four areas of star and ask students to help you look for places you might do these tests in your writing. Have students pair up or working groups, and have them see if they can come up with one suggestion for each of the four tasks for each other's writing. Moving to the You Do part, you can have students look at their own writing and try to come up with one idea for each task. And then finally have them apply what they have discovered by trying out some of the suggestions that they have gained. One thing that might be helpful would be to tell students that this exercise, while that hopefully will result in them being able to improve their current writing, really has a larger goal, which is to teach revision. These are things they can try out with all their writing. They can try this star method. Also, the more students learn to do this, you begin to see each student's strengths and weaknesses. For instance, one student might severely underwrite and need the most help adding material, while another may need the most help with rearranging or organizing. In terms of the scaffold, students might start out with a sheet of paper that lists the components of star, often offers suggestions for the kind of things the student might look for, uses color coding or drawing, or anything that helps the student engaged. Later on, they might simply need to be reminded of the acronym S T A R. They will be able to remember what each letter refers to, and after that, perhaps they won't even need to think about star. But we'll find the four specific tests so familiar that they do them without thinking of the word star. At that point, the scaffold is no longer needed, and the student has moved this skill from the zone of proximal development, into the zone of what they can do on their own.
