Your child will have many learning experiences as she grows. As a parent, you want to make those experiences as positive and successful as possible. You want to be a positive part of your child’s learning. You send your child to school, but, in fact, you are your child’s most important teacher. Mastering some specific teaching strategies will help you achieve that goal. One important teaching strategy is called scaffolding. A scaffold is a support that is attached to a building as it is being built. As the walls of the building are put in place, the scaffold is taken down. Scaffolding, in education, is support provided to the student and is systematically removed as the student masters the task. Scaffolding is a way of providing your child with the help she needs without providing too much help so that her learning is delayed.
Definition of Scaffolding
Described in everyday language, scaffolding is letting your child do the parts of the task she can do, providing assistance on the other parts, and performing the parts for her that she can’t do. The purpose of scaffolding is to increase the success rate of your child’s learning and to reduce the failure rate. The biggest motivation for learning is an increase in one’s competence. People like to be able to do things, and children especially do. For a child, everyday brings new ability to manage his world. That is truly exciting, but difficulties in learning a task can dampen that excitement, even making your child reluctant to attempt new experiences for fear of failure. As a parent, you want to make learning fun for your child. This technique is especially designed to allow you to provide just the amount of assistance your child needs. Instead of feeling she is being instructed, your child will experience your teaching as doing things together with you. Scaffolding can significantly support a positive relationship with your child.
Steps of the Procedure
Scaffolding can be accomplished in six steps. As you get proficient with it, scaffolding will become a natural way of interacting with your child when you are teaching him. Scaffolding helps you know when and where to help your child so that she can have a successful learning experience.
1) The first thing you want to do is to observe your child doing the task without any help from you. In Education, we call this taking a baseline. In your observation, you will be noticing three areas of your child’s performance. You will look for parts of the task he can do without any help; you will look for parts of the task he can partly do but needs some help to do them proficiently; and you will look for parts of the task he cannot do at all and requires you to do it for him. These are three different levels of performance and are important for you to know to systematically help your child.
2) Next, determine the order for which you will provide assistance. Provide no assistance on those parts of the task that he performs competently. Provide assistance on those parts she can partly do competently. On those parts he can’t do at all, you will do these for him.
3) Be sensitive to the amount of assistance your child can tolerate. Limit your assistance to those task steps on which your child can tolerate assistance. As he masters the task, his tolerance for assistance will increase.
4) Be aware of your child’s increasing ability to perform the task. As she masters a task step, stop providing assistance.
5) When your child no longer needs assistance on the steps on which you have been providing assistance, begin providing assistance on those steps which she cannot perform at all. At this point in your child’s progress, he has more ability for the task than he did when you began working with him. Thus, he may be able to do more of the parts of the task on which he formerly could do nothing.
6) Observe your child’s performance on these remaining parts of the task. Begin to provide the assistance she needs on these steps.
Additional Information About The Procedure
You have provided the assistance your child needs in a systematic way. You observed her performance and identified the kind of assistance she needs in each part of the task. In the scaffolding procedure, your relationship to your child is not one of teacher-pupil. You and your child are sharing an activity at which you have more skill. By the act of engaging in this activity together, you child is learning from you and increasing her skill for the task. Being an active participant in a task is different from being a teacher of the task. This distinction puts you in a unique position to help your child. Your child will enjoy doing something with her parent more than being taught by a teacher, even if the teacher is her parent. Through your participation in the task, your child will be motivated to match your performance.
As soon as your child has increased his skill on part of the task, recognize that achievement. Awareness of your child’s progress is important to prevent the occurrence of unnecessary help on your part. You want to give your child just the help she needs and no more. Furthermore, you want to provide that help only as long as she needs it. Providing assistance longer than she needs will make her dependent upon your assistance. Your goal for her is to become independent at the task as soon as possible. For that independence to emerge, you have to remove your assistance as his skills increase.
The scaffolding procedure stands alone as a technique of instruction but it doesn’t have to do so. It can be used in conjunction with other instructional procedures. The purpose of instructional procedures is to provide your child information about a task. The scaffolding procedure provides a lot of information. However, it does a good job of targeting the instruction to specific parts of the task. When you engage with your child in a task, you provide tactile information when you are touching him. You can reduce the amount of information one are presenting at one time by modeling the step for your child. You can present a model by saying, “Watch me do it first. I’ll do it alone.” Then after modeling the step, say, “Let’s do it together, now.” When you use a model, first, you will name the parts of the task as is discussed in the blog on modeling. This will give your child an opportunity to identify all the important parts of the task. Furthermore, those important parts will have been presented in a way that your child will be better able to focus on them.
The scaffolding procedure is very flexible. It increases your child’s success rate and this increase in success rate increases your child’s motivation. More importantly, it allows you to be a teacher and a parent to your child at the same time.