Scaffolding
A second strategy that literacy teachers must be familiar with is
scaffolding. Scaffolding requires the teacher to give each student the amount of
support that they need to complete the learning objective or task successfully.
Tompkins (2011) described five levels of support that educators can give to their
students. The first level is modeling, where the teacher shows the students how
to complete the task. Modeling offers the highest level of support. The second
level is where the teacher and students share the work by creating the product
together, but the teacher still does all of the writing or recording. The third level
of support is where the teacher and students interact to create the product by
incorporating both teacher and student ideas and sharing the work of writing or
creating the product. The next level is guided practice, where the teacher
presents the lesson and then supervises the children as they practice the new skill
they have learned in groups or on their own. The fourth level, which offers the
least amount of support, is when the students do the work independently with little
or no help from the teacher (Tompkins, 2011).
A fourth grade teacher taught her students to recognize quality writing and
to engage in "literary borrowing" by adapting and using the plots, characters,
imagery and word choice that they discovered in the literature. The teacher used
the "gradual release of responsibility model." First she pointed out accomplished
writing to her students. Then, she used guided practice to help her students find
examples of quality writing and modeled how to use the strategies in their own
writing. Finally, she engaged them in independent practice by allowing them to
implement the quality writing that they had found during a "writing and conferring
time" (Griffith, 2010).
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References
Griffith, R. R. (2010). Students learn to read like writers: A framework for
teachers of writing. Reading horizons 50 (1), 49-66.
Tompkins, G. E. (2011). Literacy in the Early Grades (3rd ed.) Boston, MA: Pearson
Education, Inc.
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