About scaffolding. Or how I learned that I’m working on a construction site

After a three-week immersion in educational theories, models and concepts, a few things have certainly become clearer. I also find it intellectually challenging trying to understand how we actually learn, what factors influence the process and how all this has to be taken into account when designing and deploying instructional activities. I also had the chance to reflect on my (online and offline) teaching practice and I realised that, although I have got some things instinctively right (that’s a pleasant surprise!), there are so many aspects of the educational process that teachers simply don’t spend enough time thinking about. Mastering your discipline is just not enough to teach it in an effective way.

One other outcome of my transition towards a new discipline is that I became familiar with an entirely new jargon (as if the European Studies jargon was not enough). Some terms became clearer, while some activities I’ve been performing (finally) received a proper name and label. That is how I learned that, while I was designing means of assisting students in their learning process, I was, in fact, scaffolding. Yes, I know that the term brings up a very concrete mental image, that of scaffolds used for building or renovating buildings. And in order to understand what instructional scaffolding really means, I would invite you to conjure up exactly that image. Pretty much like the scaffold structures support the builders in their work, educators devise various methods of supporting learners to understand new concepts and construct meaning, thus getting closer to reaching their learning goals.

These strategies that support thinking can take various shapes depending on the purpose they are designed for. This book offers what I find to be a very clear and practical typology of scaffolding. In very brief terms, these are the four main types of strategies and what they actually do:

• procedural scaffolding: helping learners to navigate through the course, by guiding them through the learning environment and managing their expectations;
• metacognitive scaffolding: supporting learners to manage their learning; this involves clear meaningful planning (linking course objectives to activities), continuous monitoring and feedback and offering various tools for evaluation, self-evaluation and reflection;
• conceptual scaffolding: providing support for engaging with difficult content (identifying key concepts and structuring them in a meaningful way); graphical features such as concept maps and diagrams can be very helpful at this stage;
• strategic scaffolding: a slightly more abstract type of scaffolding, it refers to the close monitoring of individual learning performance, with the aim to help learners achieve a level of understanding they cannot achieve by themselves. This is closely linked to Vygotsky’s concept of Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which is essentially the area between what a learner can do by himself and what he can achieve with the support of peers and/or the instructor. This is, thus, the precise area where the scaffolding takes place. Nevertheless, educators need to pay special attention that the amount of support is neither more nor less than what the learner needs in that specific moment in order to reach the next level of understanding. From there he can, again, operate individually, until he reaches the threshold towards the next ZPD. And so the strategic scaffolding cycle continues.

This probably seems common sense to most educators. It is, actually, something we do in practice on a daily basis, without assigning it a special mental label and without taking a moment to reflect on it. But I think the scaffolding metaphor is very suitable: we are in fact working on a permanent construction site. Educators are both architects and construction coordinators, designing the plans for the building and the deployment of the scaffolding but also climbing the scaffolds alongside the learners.

Scaffolds are not fixed structures; they are mobile, flexible and temporary. But they need to be stable and they need to offer support. You hardly find two identical scaffolding structures. But do we ever encounter two identical learning paths?