Posted on: 27/02/2023
At Literacy Tree, we are passionate about the inclusivity of our Teach Through a Text approach. The texts we select, from picture books to novels are chosen because of their quality language, rich themes and diverse characters. By selecting texts pitched at the interest level, rather than just the reading level of the children, we can ensure engagement for all. While our planning sequences use end of year objectives, it is important to acknowledge that of course, we can’t teach all children in the same way. While thankfully the days of numerous differentiated expectations, success criteria and outcomes are a thing of the past, we can provide effective differentiation through appropriately varied support and scaffolding to allow all children to be successful.
When thinking about the purpose of scaffolding, a useful analogy to consider is that of a swimming lesson, in which every swimmer in the pool has the objective of swimming a width. For some swimmers, their guidance will be poolside; perhaps tips on breathing, stroke control, and maybe even the occasional tumble-turn at the end. For others, they’ll need more support; maybe a float or noodle, or perhaps armbands. Some may need an inflatable ring, or others even a lilo! But the expectation is that all those swimmers will make it from one side of the pool to the other successfully, with whatever level of support is needed to get them there. In time, that support can be gradually reduced. Think of scaffolding as those different levels of support for those swimmers.
Within our planning sequences, while some suggestions for support and challenge are given, the sequences are not differentiated, and therefore personalisation for the needs of your class (particularly in the Autumn term!) is essential – after all, you know your class best! For school members with access to our Classroom Toolkit, this is a great place to start when thinking about how to cater to the needs of all your children when teaching through a text, without needing to alter the text or the objectives. Often, a key part of effective scaffolding involves minimising the cognitive load on pupils to allow them to focus on the key learning. Our Classroom Toolkit is a great way of doing this; by repeatedly using similar task designs and tools in our planning sequences, the cognitive load on children is reduced; as children come across the same structures and formats time and time again, they become part and parcel of their learning toolkit. So with this in mind, we have put together five top tips for scaffolding learning when teaching through a text, drawing on our Classroom Toolkit to help you.
Partially completing tables or templates, like our Activating Inference grids, can be an effective way to scaffold support. This could take a number of forms, for example, providing some children with the first row or column partially or fully completed. With the Activating Inference grid, for example, perhaps for some children, the ‘What I Know’ column could be partially or fully completed, to enable them to focus on finding the evidence. Remember that scaffolding works both ways too – why not challenge some of your children targeted for Greater Depth by giving them some evidence – can they work backwards to use the evidence to locate the facts?
We are firm believers of ‘giving language for free’ at Literacy Tree – we want to provide children with the rich, high-quality language they need rather than expecting them to just come up with it by themselves. By giving children vocabulary, it allows them to focus on constructing that language into meaningful phrases and sentences. Vocabulary based tasks like zones of relevance and traffic light vocabulary can be easily scaffolded by providing fewer language options, or fewer categories to sort into. Instead of changing the language to simpler vocabulary, keep the exposure to high-quality language but instead reduce the cognitive load by reducing the number of words children are expected to sort. You could use ‘On the dot or not’ as a simplified version of a zone of relevance, or remove the amber on the traffic light to make the language simpler to sort. Why not also include some language you know they are more familiar with to boost confidence levels and activate prior knowledge? Providing children with the opportunity to practise jigsawing language to create phrases like “a spiralling sense of doom” in our resource ‘Jigsaw Feelings’ pays dividends in steering children away from simple feelings adjectives. For some children, removing the adjectives column from the jigsaw can be enough to allow them to access the language and create their own constructs. Again, reducing the number of available options can be a great way of allowing all children exposure to that rich language, without overwhelming them. Perhaps stagger the task by initially exploring the differing meanings of the nouns in the second column, maybe with some ranking. Which is stronger? Which lasts longer? A pang? A wave? Or a flush? For some children, a more staggered build up to using the resource is all they need to access it fully. This way, all children are included and on the same journey, with minor tweaks and variations to allow them to access the learning.
Providing children with writing frames is a helpful way to support them to organise their thinking and improve cohesion. This might be using key questions, subheadings, text boxes, sentence starters or structured templates. Providing additional prompts can be enough to scaffold children’s thinking. At the planning stage for extended writes, providing subheadings or key words within planning formats like bare bones planning can support children’s thinking. It is important to remember that this principle applies to longer pieces of writing, too. Sometimes the temptation can be to withdraw all forms of support under the guise of ‘independence’, but if some children’s learning has been successfully scaffolded throughout a learning journey, it is important not to pull this all away suddenly when it comes to the extended write. Remember that elements of scaffolding and/or modelling do not negate the independence of the entire piece.
We are firm advocates of the importance of sentence level work for all children in every year group, but for those who struggle with sentence sense it is particularly important. The use of sentence strips is invaluable in developing children’s understanding of what makes a sentence. Alongside this, try using sentence stems to get children started, cloze procedure style sentences where children fill in the gaps and jigsaw sentences where individual words are cut up to enable children to structure them into complete sentences. Making sure these are always ‘sentence ready’, with no punctuation allows children to continue to practise their skills at punctuating sentences accurately.
Pre-teaching is another form of scaffolding which is easy to forget. When it comes to new vocabulary, this is a particularly useful way of supporting children to give them a head start, revisit previously taught vocabulary and introduce new language. Why not allow some of your children to rehearse language sorting activities like Zones of Relevance or Vocabulary Venns in advance of the lesson? Oral rehearsal during pre-teaching is particularly important, and thinking carefully about how this can be embedded into any existing intervention time can also be useful.
Of course, in some instances (for example, where children are working significantly below age related expectations) it may be appropriate to tweak an objective to meet their needs. But in the majority of cases, careful task design combined with variation through scaffolding, using ideas like those above, will allow the whole class to be successful. We hope that these top tips will support you in how to scaffold learning tasks to meet the needs of all the children in your class, so that all children can reap the benefits and joy of teaching through a text! We love seeing how teachers adapt and personalise planning sequences to meet the needs of their classes, so please do keep sharing these with us!
Posted in: Curriculum
