Our Teaching Pedagogy

Our tutors employ Lev Vygosky's scaffolding techniques to guide the student towards academic excellence.

Scaffolding instruction as a teaching strategy originates from Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory and his concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD).

“The zone of proximal development is the distance between what children can do by themselves and the next learning that they can be helped to achieve with competent assistance” (Raymond, 2000, p.176).

The scaffolding teaching strategy provides individualized support based on the learner’s ZPD (Chang, Sung, & Chen, 2002).

In scaffolding instruction a more knowledgeable teacher provides scaffolds or supports to facilitate the learner’s development. The scaffolds facilitate a student’s ability to build on prior knowledge and internalize new information. The activities provided in scaffolding instruction are just beyond the level of what the learner can do alone (Olson & Pratt, 2000). The more capable teacher provides the scaffolds so that the learner can accomplish (with assistance) the tasks that he or she could otherwise not complete, thus helping the learner through the ZPD (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

Vygotsky defined scaffolding instruction as the “role of teachers and others in supporting the learner’s development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level” (Raymond, 2000, p. 176). An important aspect of scaffolding instruction is that the scaffolds are temporary. As the learner’s abilities increase the scaffolding provided by the more knowledgeable teacher is progressively withdrawn. Finally the learner is able to complete the task or master the concepts independently (Chang, Sung, & Chen, 2002, p. 7). Therefore the goal of our teachers when using the scaffolding teaching strategy is for the student to become an independent and self-regulating learner and problem solver (Hartman, 2002). As the learner’s knowledge and learning competency increases, our teachers gradually reduce the supports provided (Ellis, Larkin, Worthington, n.d.).

According to Vygotsky the external scaffolds provided by the educator can be removed because the learner has developed “…more sophisticated cognitive systems, related to fields of learning such as mathematics or language, the system of knowledge itself becomes part of the scaffold or social support for the new learning” (Raymond, 2000, p. 176).

Our teachers help young children learn how to link old information or familiar situations with new knowledge through verbal and nonverbal communication and modeling behaviors. Observational research on early childhood learning shows that parents and teachers facilitate learning by providing scaffolds. The scaffolds provided are activities and tasks that:

• Motivate or enlist the child’s interest related to the task
• Simplify the task to make it more manageable and achievable for a child
• Provide some direction in order to help the child focus on achieving the goal
• Clearly indicate differences between the child’s work and the standard or desired solution
• Reduce frustration and risk
• Model and clearly define the expectations of the activity to be performed (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking, 2000).

In the educational setting, scaffolds may include models, cues, prompts, hints, partial solutions, think-aloud modeling and direct instruction (Hartman, 2002). Our teachers also use questions as scaffolds to help students solve a problem or complete a task. Our teachers may increase the level of questioning or specificity until the student is able to provide a correct response.

Following the use of teacher provided scaffolds, our teachers may then have the students engage in cooperative learning. In this type of environment students help students in small group settings but still have some teacher assistance. This can serve as a step in the process of decreasing the scaffolds provided by the educator and needed by students (Hartman, 2002).

Our teachers have also used scaffolding to engage students in research work and learning. In this context, scaffolding facilitates organization of and focus for students’ research (McKenzie, 1999). The structure and clearly defined expectations are the most important component of scaffolding in this context. The first six describe aspects of scaffolding instruction:

1. Provides clear direction and reduces students’ confusion – teachers anticipate problems that students might encounter and then develop step by step instructions, which explain what a student must do to meet expectations.
2. Clarifies purpose – Scaffolding helps students understand why they are doing the work and why it is important.
3. Keeps students on task – By providing structure, the scaffolded lesson or research project, provides pathways for the learners. The student can make decisions about which path to choose or what things to explore along the path but they cannot wander off of the path, which is the designated task.
4. Clarifies expectations and incorporates assessment and feedback – Expectations are clear from the beginning of the activity since examples of exemplary work, rubrics, and standards of excellence are shown to the students.
5. Points students to worthy sources – Teachers provide sources to reduce confusion, frustration, and time. The students may then decide which of these sources to use.
6. Reduces uncertainty, surprise, and disappointment – Teachers test their lessons to determine possible problem areas and then refine the lesson to eliminate difficulties so that learning is maximized (McKenzie, 1999).