L&T Blog T2 Week 2: Scaffolding - improving our adaptive classrooms!

 

Dear WA,

I hope everyone is well! This week I was interested to read about the recent evidence for differentiation and adaptive teaching in an article by Edutopia. This is very much linked to our ongoing work on making learning personalised and student-centred. 

Objectives: To suggest evidence-based strategies for differentiation and adaptive teaching.

Summary: The article outline a number of scaffolding strategies that can be used to support student understanding as follows:

• Checking your resources: Making resources as clear and as concise as possible. The meaningful and judicious use of highlighting, underlining and arrows can all be used to better support retention of knowledge. The author also suggests asking students ‘Are my lessons and assignments clear?’ to gain valuable feedback about this.
• Building up relevant prior knowledge: Neuroscientific research has demonstrated that the brains seek to make connections with previously taught material. As such, giving students opportunities to retrieve or reactive prior knowledge before moving forward is very important from a scaffolding perspective.
• Offer multimodal materials: Pairing teacher instruction with visuals, videos, role play opportunities and diagrams has a significant impact on the ability to retain information.
• Use of graphic organisers: Making a summary visual representation of complex ideas is likely to support student understanding and retention. 
• Use ‘pre-testing’: Giving students a ‘pre-test’ can help students organise thoughts and enhance curiosity to get to the ‘correct answer’ when they actually learn the material. 
• Use of metacognitive questioning: When giving students something new, encouraging them to ask ‘What parts are familiar to me? What parts are new?’ and ‘How does this connect to what I already know?’ is likely to provide a help scaffold.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

• Which of these strategies am I currently using? How are they working out? How do I know?
• Which would I like to incorporate into my practice? What support will I need to do this?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks, Jaya