Scaffolding without Suffocating

Scaffolding is a term often used to describe supports and guidance we give to children as they are learning new things. The term scaffolding is used frequently in education.

Michael Pressley, a leading literacy researcher, described scaffolding as:

“The scaffolding of a building under construction provides support when the new building cannot stand on its own. As the new structure is completed and becomes freestanding, the scaffolding is removed. So it is with scaffolded adult-child academic interactions. The adult carefully monitors when enough instructional input has been provided to permit the child to make progress toward an academic goal, and thus the adult provides support only when the child needs it. If the child catches on quickly, the adult’s responsive instruction will be less detailed than if the child experiences difficulties with the task” (2002, pp. 97-98).

Importance of Scaffolding

It is so important to provide scaffolding for our children, but sometimes it is tough to know how much is too much. There is no one right or wrong answer. Sometimes your child will need more scaffolding (support) and sometimes they will need less. The amount of scaffolding or help you provide will depend on your child and the task they are trying to accomplish.

Just like teaching them to ride a bike, sometimes you will need to hold on to their handle bars as you run along-side and other times you will be able to just be near as they ride. There are also times when you need to grab back on to steady them over a tricky path. Just like helping your child become skilled at bike riding, helping your child with reading and writing also requires moving back and forth between offering more and less help.

Warning About Scaffolding

It is important to realize when your child has become so accustomed to your support or help that they are using it as a crutch. If you feel like you are doing all of the work, then you are probably doing too much. Think about if the work is beyond what your child is currently able to do or if your child has become so used to you doing the work for them. If the work is beyond what your child can do, think about how to change the activity so your child can be successful.

It is also important to not give so much help that your child feels overwhelmed and no longer wants to try. Pay close attention to how your child responds to your support and be willing to try new approaches or ways to help. You can even ask your child what kinds of help they prefer. Their insight can be valuable.

Here’s an example:

I spoke with a friend recently whose child was really struggling to read books on his grade level. He was having such a hard time that he lost motivation to read. Recognizing his resistance and need for more help, my friend changed up their nightly reading routine. She let him choose books that he could successfully read even if they weren’t on his grade level. She also partner read with him: she read a page aloud and then he would read the next page aloud, then she would read a page aloud and then he read a page aloud, and so on. This was really successful for her child and he began looking forward to his reading time in the evenings. Because he had more practice reading, he also began to improve his reading abilities. She was slowly able to hand over all of the reading to him during their nightly reading time. He simply needed this particular scaffold to regain his interest in reading and his confidence as a reader.

If your child is relying on you and can actually do more of the work, slowly remove some of your help so that they are gradually doing more of the reading and problem-solving work. Later in this post, I share some prompts you can use with your child to encourage their independence.

Support with Strategies

If your child needs more support, teach them strategies they can use to problem-solve on their own. For example, you can teach your child to pay attention to patterns in a text to figure out tricky words (for younger readers) or how patterns in a text help them better understand characters (for readers reading more challenging texts).

Teaching your child strategies can encourage their independence and help them set goals from themselves as learners.

In How Children Learn, John Holt describes a young girl’s learning behaviors:

“what she rightly resented was my taking it upon myself to teach her without being asked. When she learned to read, it was going to be by her own choosing, at her own time, and in her own way. This spirit of independence in learning is one of the most valuable assets a learner can have, and we who want to help children’s learning, at home or at school, must learn to respect and encourage it” (p. 126)

Just as I shared in the bike analogy, as your child becomes more experienced and more confident in their abilities, they will need less or different types of scaffolding.

Where to Focus Your Help

One thing that is easy to focus on is how fluently your child is reading. This includes their pacing, phrasing, intonation, and accuracy. These things are really important for reading; however, it is imperative that children pay attention to whether or not they understand the text as they read. The moment a reader loses their understanding in a text, we want them to search for more information and use strategies to problem-solve.

Here are four things you can do when working with your reader:

Show them how you notice when you have made an error in your reading
Show them how you make sure their reading is accurate and makes sense
Prompt them to notice when they make an error and to make sure their reading is accurate
Reinforce when your child shows that they are paying attention to whether or not what they are reading makes sense

As you listen to your child, you can decide to intervene briefly by prompting and reinforcing the way they are noticing and fixing up any errors.

Here are some useful prompts you can use for noticing and fixing up errors when reading:

Find the part that’s not quite right.
Does that look right?
Try it another way.
I like the way you worked that out.
That looks right but does it make sense?

Here are some useful prompts you can use to encourage your child to figure out a word:

Do you see a part that might help?
Look for a part you know.
Do you know a similar word? Do you know a word like that?

Here are some useful prompts you can use to encourage your child to figure out what a word means:

Read around the word (sentence(s)/paragraph). What could that word mean?
Is that word like any other words you know?
Think about the root word.

Here are some useful prompts you can use to encourage your child to think about clues (information) in the text that can help them problem solve or check to see that they are understanding:

Think about what would make sense and check with the letters.
What can you do to help yourself?
What do you know that might help?

Here are some useful prompts you can use to support your child’s reading fluency:

How do you think your reading sounds?
Make it sound like the characters are talking.
Put your words together so it sounds like the way you talk.
Make your voice sound like an expert on the subject or like you are teaching someone about the topic.

To reinforce that your child is paying attention to whether or not the text is making sense, you can do the following:

Ask your child if they came to any tricky parts while they were reading.
- If they did, ask them to show you those parts and talk about how they could look for information that could help them.
Return to a part of the text you noticed your child having some difficulty. Show them ways of working through the tricky part.
Point out a word, a concept, or other part of the text where you can show your child how they can problem solve tricky parts. Show them how to pay attention and look for important and/or helpful information.

Supporting your child in their reading and writing can be tricky but as with anything else, giving them helpful feedback and advice to encourage their independence can make a huge difference.

Pressley, M. (2002). Metacognition and self-regulated comprehension. In A. E. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (3^rd ed.), 291-309. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

For additional reading on prompts and particular reading levels:

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2011). The continuum of literacy learning, Grades K-8: A guide to teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Fountas, I. C., & Pinnell, G. S. (2016). Guided reading: Good first teaching for all children (2^nd edition). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Please leave a comment below and let me know if there are specific strategies you would like to learn more about. Also, stay tuned for specific strategies for different kinds of texts and specific text levels.