Elevate Your Teaching: How Scaffolding Theory Can Transform Education

What is the biggest deterrent to learning?

Sometimes, tutors will come across jaded, dejected and unmotivated students who struggle to engage in their learning and achieve their desired learning outcomes; their lack of motivation leads to failure, and their failure leads to an even greater lack of motivation. We might think that this problem originates from laziness, and in some cases, that would be true. Often, however, the problem can arise from different factors. The first of these other factors we need to understand as educators are failure itself. Like it or not, when we do something that doesn’t have a guaranteed outcome, our brain has a tendency to view it as a gamble, even if the odds are based on our own effort rather than luck. Failure is inevitable in some way or another, eventually, we’ll get an answer wrong here and there, or maybe we’ll even fail an entire test. What happens next for some people is that their brain will try to find factors, other than their own effort, to put the blame on, and it’s a vicious cycle. Eventually, a student might become so avoidant and afraid of the prospect of failure that they will go as far as to reason that as long as they didn’t try in the first place, it’s not really a failure on their part. This behaviour is common and noticeable among younger students and especially teenagers, who are developing their own self-image and getting to grips with their own egos in relation to success and failure. What they’ve unknowingly stumbled upon is a psychological phenomenon called effort justification, which states that we have a tendency to more highly value achievements that we put a lot of effort into, and value less that which we put less effort into.

A second cause of loss of motivation in learning is a lack of support, guidance and validation in the learning process. It’s imperative as educators that we are not just robots, who dictate a syllabus to our students, but instead sympathetic and understanding people, who our students can go to whenever they hit a wall, or need extra reassurance in order to overcome a hurdle. Students who feel alone will always have a hard time staying focused and motivated.

The last reason we’ll touch on today is perhaps a bit more niche, but still salient. Sometimes, students might feel as though the work they are doing has no relevance to them, simply because they do not have a chance to practise the skills they are learning, or apply them to any real-world situation. As Kant said, “theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind”. A harmony of both is necessary for our minds to stay engaged with a subject matter; even theoretical physicists perform experiments in between their calculations after all.

How can we fix this?

The solution we’re focusing on today is called Scaffolding Theory, also known as scaffolding teaching, scaffolding learning or Vygotsky's Scaffolding. Before we take a look at how scaffolding can help us in the classroom, let’s first remind ourselves how it works in real life. Scaffolding in real construction is a temporary support structure built alongside a project which permits the construction crew to access and work from higher elevations, and move materials from the ground to anywhere they might need it. Scaffolding in teaching is extremely similar, in that we aim to create or provide temporary support to our students which allows them to work at a higher level than their own, until they can eventually do it on their own, without the help of their teacher. Effectively, we are letting our students borrow our know-how and use it to solve problems, then gradually removing the “scaffolding” until they’ve built their own. This probably doesn’t sound like a new idea when it comes to teaching, but it is undeniably a helpful analogy that lets us understand exactly what’s going on throughout the teaching process, in addition to the importance of closely working with and guiding our students every step of the way.

What does Scaffolding Theory look like in practice?

With scaffolding psychology in mind, we want to start small, ever conscious that our students might not have ever seen or done the things we are teaching them before. At first, we might just want to demonstrate the process or skill to them, and let them become familiar with what it’s supposed to look like, have them take notes and answer simple questions about it to make sure they understand what’s going on, before making them try it themselves; this is analogous to building the instructional scaffolding. If you’ve read our article on generative learning, you’ll see how these processes are interlinked with each other. The first demonstrations are a great opportunity to employ generative learning and have your students cooperate with each other and generate their own responses.

The next step is to have the students try the skill or process for themselves, but very gradually at first. It’s a good idea to break down the idea into individual steps and try to teach one step at a time. Once the student knows how to do all the steps, they can attempt to do the whole thing by themselves. Teamwork between multiple students can be particularly useful in identifying the independence and competence we are looking for by the end of the process. A student who has fully grasped a skill or concept should be able to explain it to one of their peers and asking students to either teach each other or write a detailed explanation of what they’ve learned can be a brilliant alternative to normal testing to gauge understanding.

Finally, let’s look at a short example of how this might work in a real situation: the time-honoured classic of riding a bike.

A parent using scaffolding stages will first show their child what a bike is, and what riding a bike looks like, making sure they understand the most important things before they even try, such as the direction to push the pedals, the motion of the legs and of course to wear a helmet!

Following, they might sit their child on a bike that has training wheels, and then place the child's feet on the pedals correctly, hands on the handlebars, and make the motions for them.

They would then lead the child by the hand until they were comfortable moving on their own, steering and moving in a straight line at different speeds.

The last step would be to remove the training wheels and supervise the child until they are cycling safely without them.

Who does this work best for?

Scaffolding education works well for everyone, since humans are evolved to cooperate with each other, and will always do better with support than on their own. Children and teenagers benefit especially from scaffolding steps because younger learners have not necessarily learned how to learn for themselves. As educators, it's worth emphasising scaffolding with our younger students since not only will we be building support for the current subject they are studying, but we will also be building the support for their learning competence overall, which works in largely the same way. That’s sort of what school is in a way, because in life, we never stop learning, rather the support for doing so is gradually taken away until we are independent. I specified earlier that this theory is not new to any of us, but rather a way of more precisely understanding the process of learning and accommodating it as tutors.

Who discovered/invented the scaffolding theory?

Born in Modern day Belarus in 1896, Lev Vygotsky is credited with the development of scaffolding theory, the result of his research on the psychological development of children. His work varied a lot in its subject, within the field of psychology, but his most well-known work, which would come to be known as scaffolding theory is a concept that he called ZDP, or the Zone of Proximal development. This concept suggests that what a learner is capable of can be visualised as a zone around them. The zone can be subdivided into smaller zones, the centremost of which is what the learner is capable of doing, learning, or achieving themselves. Beyond this zone is the “zone of proximal development”, which represents what the learner is capable of with the help of a teacher, helper, or educator. This can of course is further divided, based on what quality or type of help the learner is achieving. Finally, there is the outermost zone, which is infinite and contains that which the learner is incapable of achieving, with or without help. The size of these zones can of course change with time and different conditions, but understanding this visualisation is what provides us with scaffolding theory, as a way of categorising and changing what we can and can’t achieve.

What next?

If you enjoyed reading this article or found it interesting or useful, why not check out some of our other articles from the “advice for tutors” series, most of which are linked to the one you just read? If you’ve got other things on your mind, you can also check back later for other articles on all sorts of subjects; we’ve got it all here on Superprof.