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scaffolding

Why I think table top mats are better than wall displays

2016-05-29T09:13:48+01:00May 29th, 2016|Featured|

A couple of days ago I posted an article exploring why I'm not keen on teaching being expected to spend time putting on displays in their classrooms. This made some people happy :) but a few people were sad :(  . One criticism was that some displays contain important information that can be covered up so that students can be tested to see whether they've memorised it. This is the Bananarama Principle: It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it. Wall displays can be used well and table top mats can be used badly. So, of course displays [...]

Scaffolding: what we can learn from the metaphor

2015-05-11T20:39:58+01:00May 11th, 2015|literacy|

Pretty much everyone agrees scaffolding students' work is a 'good thing'. Whenever they get stuck we leap in with our trusty writing frames and help them get going. A good writing frame can teach an understanding of text coherence and structure, prompt metacognition and serve as jolly useful checklist. But I think we get a few things wrong. Thinking about where the scaffolding metaphor comes from is instructive. Builders use scaffolding to enable them to attempt projects which would be otherwise impossible - or at least very unsafe. They do not use scaffolding to help them knock together a dwarf wall in your [...]

Teaching sequence for developing independence Stage 3: Scaffold

2013-07-19T14:15:02+01:00July 2nd, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

So, you've explained the new concepts and ideas students will need to know, deconstructed examples so that they know how to use these concepts in practice and you've modelled the process of how an expert would go about creating an effective example of whatever product students need to create. Surely they're now ready to be released, joyfully, on to the foothills of independent learning? No, not quite yet they're not. Everyone benefits from scaffolding to help move them from kind of knowing vaguely what to do to being confident. Confidence is key; if students lack it then they're really going to [...]

Great teaching happens in cycles – the teaching sequence for developing independence

2016-09-25T13:35:23+01:00June 24th, 2013|Featured, learning, Teaching sequence|

Last year I wrote a post called The Anatomy of an Outstanding Lesson, which has become by far my most viewed post with almost 10,000 page views. Clearly teachers are hungry for this kind of thing. But it’s become increasingly obvious to me over the past few months that many of my notions about what might constitute an outstanding lesson have been turned on their head. It’s not so much that I was wrong, more that my understanding was incomplete. If we accept, as I’m sure we do, that as teachers we want to accomplish different things at different points in our schemes [...]

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