2001). Teachers and children converse about science experiments, math problems, and pieces of literature. Teachers and students question. Teachers and students do a great deal of explaining of their thinking, with teachers providing supportive hints and gentle guidance as students require it. Parents are part of this community of learning as well, often joining in the planning of instruction and the collaborative interactions that make up the instruction. Everyone in the community works hard to provide experiences that are interesting to the students, with dialogue between teachers, parents, and students with respect to every aspect of the schooling experi- ence.
Although the Rogoff and colleagues (2001) approach to schooling is a demon- stration school at this point, many individual classroom teachers are doing what they can to create communities of learners who collaborate in ways consistent with Vygotskian-based education (Duckworth, 2001; Hogan & Pressley, 1997b; Palincsar, 1998). For an example of a teacher who mastered the art of teaching mathematics in a classroom community of learners, one where students ref lect on, discuss, and con- struct understandings of math every day, see Lampert (2001). In that classroom, as in other classrooms inspired by Vygotskian constructivist thinking, teachers listen care- fully to their students’ explanations as they grapple with content and do what they can to nudge them in directions that permit even better and more expansive thinking about the content. The students in Lampert’s classroom are problem-solving appren- tices who grow in their problem-solving competence through extensive constructive ref lection about the problems that are the focus of the lessons.
In summary, while many demonstrations of adult–child apprenticeships (Rogoff, 1990, 1998) exist, parent–child and teacher–child scaffolding are anything but uni- versal. Moreover, although some effective forms of instruction involve scaffolding, it has yet to be demonstrated as far superior to other forms of instruction, although scaffolding is prominent in the teaching of many very effective educators. Educators continue to develop educational approaches that are consistent with Vygotskian thinking, with teacher–student dialoguing and scaffolding key in such approaches.
There are now Vygotskian approaches to early childhood education (Bodrova &
Leong, 2003), primary education (Zuckerman, 2003), special education (Gindis, 2003), second-language education (Lantolf, 2003), and education of cultural minor- ity students (Lee, 2003), as well as Vygotskian educational approaches in the content areas, including mathematics (Crawford, 1998; Schmittau, 2003), history (Haenen, Schrijnemakers, & Stuf kens, 2003), science (Driver, Asoko, Leach, Mortimer, &
Scott, 1998; Giest & Lompscher, 2003), and literacy (Miller, 2003). See the Applying Developmental Theory to Educational Contexts special feature (Box 6.4) for an example of one form of effective teaching that was developed in light of Vygotsky’s theory.
The Challenges of Scaffolding and Teaching
Applying Developmental Theory to Educational Contexts
BOX 6.4. Reciprocal Teaching
Reciprocal teaching is a form of instruction that is often showcased as consistent with Vygotskian principles (Brown & Palincsar, 1989; Palincsar, 1998, 2003; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; Palincsar & Herrenkohl, 1999). It involves instruction of comprehension strategies in the context of a reading group. Students learn to make predictions when reading, to question themselves about the text, to seek clarification when confused, and to summarize content. The adult teacher initially explains and models these strategies for students, but very quickly stu- dents learn to lead the group. One student is assigned the role of group leader. The group leader supervises the group’s generation of predictions, questions, and summaries during reading. The group leader also solicits points that need to be clarified and either provides clari- fications or elicits them from other group members. The group interactions are cooperative.
The teacher provides support on an as-needed basis, that is, scaffolded instruction.
During reciprocal teaching, the students experience multiple models of cognitive process- ing: The teacher models and explains. Peers in the group are continuously modeling reasoning about text as part of group participation. The discussions permit students to air their perspec- tives and requires them to justify their claims. These discussions also allow students to review and comment about the strategies as well as the content they are learning. The teacher is pro- gressively less involved as the students gain competence. The assumption is that by participat- ing in the group, students will eventually internalize use of the strategies encouraged as part of reciprocal teaching. This is consistent with the Vygotskian perspective that individual cognitive development develops from participation in social groups.
The dialogue from a sample lesson should help clarify what occurs during a reciprocal reading group. The dialogue that follows (from Brown & Palincsar, 1989, pp. 421–422) is from a group of low-achieving middle-school students after 13 days of experience with the method.
The students had just read the following brief text:
In the United States, salt is produced by three basic methods: solar (sun) evaporation, mining, and artificial heat evaporation. For salt to be extracted by solar evaporation, the weather must be hot and dry. Thus, solar salt is harvested in the tropic-like areas along our southern ocean coasts and at Great Salt Lake.
STUDENTLEADER(STUDENTC): Name three different basic methods how salt is produced.
STUDENTA: Evaporation, mining, evaporation . . . artificial heat evaporation.
STUDENTLEADER: Correct, very good. My summary on this paragraph is about ways that salt is produced.
TEACHER: Very good. Could you select the next teacher. [Student C does so, selecting Stu- dent L, with the reading continuing.]
The second oldest form of salt production is mining. Unlike early methods that made the work extremely dangerous and difficult, today’s methods use special machinery, and salt mining is easier and safer. The old expression “back to the salt mine” no longer applies.
STUDENTLEADER(STUDENTL): Name two words that often describe mining salt in the old days.
STUDENTK: Back to the salt mines?
STUDENTLEADERL: No. Angela?
STUDENTA: Dangerous and difficult.
(continued)
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165STUDENTLEADERL: Correct. This paragraph is about comparing the old mining of salt and today’s mining of salt.
TEACHER: Beautiful!
STUDENTLEADERL: I have a prediction to make.
TEACHER: Good.
STUDENTLEADERL: I think it might tell when salt was first discovered, well, it might tell what salt is made of and how it’s made.
TEACHER: OK. Can we have another teacher?
Table salt is made by the third method—artificial evaporation. Pumping water into an underground salt bed dissolves the salt to make a brine that is brought to the surface. After purification at high tem- peratures, the salt is ready for our tables.
STUDENTLEADERK: After purification at high temperatures the salt is ready for what?
STUDENTC: Our tables.
STUDENTLEADERK: That’s correct. To summarize: After its purification, the salt is put on our tables.
TEACHER: That was a fine job, Ken, and I appreciate all the work, but I think there might be something else to add to our summary. There is more important information that I think we need to include. This paragraph is mostly about what?
STUDENTA: The third method of evaporation.
STUDENTB: It mainly tells about pumping water from an underground salt bed that dis- solves the salt to make a brine that is brought to the surface.
TEACHER: Angela hit it right on the money. The paragraph is mostly about the method of artificial evaporation and then everything else in the paragraph is telling us about the process. OK. Next teacher . . .
In this lesson, all students were participating, with an obvious structure to the participation.
Even so, after 13 days of reciprocal teaching, the questions generated by the student leaders were all literal questions, requiring only very low-level responses. Such questions do not stimu- late thinking beyond the surface structure of the text, either to formulate the question or to answer it. Moreover, no one requested clarification, although some of the students were having trouble understanding the text, nor did students monitor when they understood and when they did not understand. In addition, the teacher offered little scaffolding, but did monitor whether the students were understanding the passage and provided clarification of the content as needed. Finally, because reciprocal teaching emphasizes the teacher’s fading support, lessons often included long pauses with students fumbling because the teacher was uncertain whether to enter into the conversation and provide input.
Even with these drawbacks, research evidence supports the benefits of reciprocal teach- ing. Rosenshine and Meister (1994) reviewed studies comparing reciprocal teaching to other forms of instruction. In general, the effects of reciprocal teaching were greater when explicit teaching of comprehension strategies occurred before participation in reciprocal teaching.
Although the benefits of reciprocal teaching were very modest when measured by standardized tests, the effects were quite striking on measures assessing directly the processes stimulated by the strategies. Students of various ages and abilities benefited similarly from reciprocal teaching. Finally, teachers are able to adapt reciprocal teaching to the specific situations in their classrooms (Hacker & Tenent, 2002; Marks et al., 1993), with considerable guidance now avail- able to teachers about how to use the approach flexibly across the language arts and school day (Oczkus, 2003).
talk about reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social science. Some teachers are real readers and let their students know how excited they are about reading par- ticular authors. Other teachers bring real writing to the classroom. They teach writ- ing by having everyone write a lot, including the teacher. The best writing teachers identify themselves as writers.
Even when teachers are masters, however, they must be highly motivated to teach using the Vygotskian model. Scaffolding demands much of teachers (Stone, 1998), and for teachers to work that hard, they must care about their students.
According to Noddings (1984, 1996; see also Tappan, 1998), caring is at the center of teacher–student apprenticeships:
This working together, which produces both joy in the relation and increasing compe- tence in the cared-for . . . needs the cooperative guidance of a fully caring adult. . . . The caring teacher . . . has two major tasks: to stretch the student’s world by presenting an effective selection of that world with which she is in contact, and to work cooperatively with the student in his struggle toward competence in that world. (1984, pp. 177–178) Noddings recognizes that caring for students is difficult to foster. Teachers have many students, limited time, and numerous objectives to meet. Yet Noddings urges teachers to give up some of their control and to foster trust in their classrooms. She argues that true dialogue promotes deep contact with the ideas presented in the cur- riculum and stimulates the development of active thinkers who are willing to take intellectual risks.
As educators have attempted to provide instruction in the zone of proximal development, the challenges of this approach to teaching have become increasingly apparent. The following are some of the major challenges facing educators trying to apply the principles of scaffolding and apprenticeship to the classroom.
Knowledge of the Curriculum
In order to provide effective scaffolding, teachers must know the curriculum well, particularly portions of the curriculum that are troubling to students. It is easy to underestimate just how demanding this is, even for elementary-level content. For example, many teachers do not have a deep understanding of elementary mathemat- ics and do not know the strategies that can be used to solve even simple addition and subtraction problems (Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, & Carey, 1988; Fennema &
Franke, 1992). More than knowing how to compute, scaffolding math teachers must also know their students’ potential misconceptions about computing and how such misconceptions translate into observable behaviors. It may take years of experience with students to build up such knowledge.
Knowledge of Individual Students
To provide effective scaffolding, the teacher must know what a particular student already knows, what the student’s misconceptions are, and what is in the student’s current zone of proximal development. That is, the teacher must know what compe- tencies are developing and which ones are far beyond the student’s current level of functioning. If it is demanding to have this kind of insight into one student in one area of the curriculum, think about the enormity of this challenge for a classroom of stu-
dents across the curriculum and when a class contains students with a variety of learning disabilities. Or think about how demanding it is for a high-school teacher who teaches many students.
Communication Challenges in Generating Prompts
Providing hints to students about the academic problems that they are experiencing requires great facility in generating hints and comments that provide enough assis- tance so that the student can make progress in solving academic problems without overdirecting them. Such prompts invite students to make the inferences a mature thinker would make, and they encourage students to construct understandings of the task at hand (Fox, 1993; Stone, 1993). Sometimes the student does not make neces- sary inferences at the first prompt, requiring generation of another prompt . . . and sometimes another one still . . . and then another, and so on. The scaffolding teacher is constantly required to think of new ways of prompting when initial prompts fail (Levine, 1993).
This is challenging, in part, because students’ understanding of cognitive pro- cesses and the associated vocabulary develops slowly (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993). For example, abstract concepts like “interpret,” “infer,” “conclude,” and
“assume” are often difficult even for high-school and college students to understand (Astington & Olsen, 1990; Booth & Hall, 1994), let alone younger students and stu- dents with cognitive disabilities. Cognitive processes must be talked about with stu- dents in very concrete ways, in terms that students can understand (Pressley et al., 1992), such as “What are you thinking as you read?,” “Is this story like anything in your life?,” or “Does this make sense to you?”
Another challenge is that many children experience difficulties in talking about difficulties they are having. The less a student can express precisely what his or her current difficulty is, the harder it is for an adult to scaffold the students’ learning. In addition, the children who are most in need of academic help are often less likely to seek it than are other children (Karabenick & Newman, 2006; Newman & Goldin, 1990; Newman & Schwager, 1992).
Maintaining a Positive Tone
Good scaffolders are always positive and patient as they provide prompting and hint- ing. Sometimes this takes a great deal of patience, especially since the scaffolding teacher provides implicit messages that students do not “have it” yet. If the scaffold- ing is going well, the student does not construe such feedback as criticism. Unfortu- nately, it is hard for many adults to be unambiguously and consistently positive with children, especially when confronted with their uncertain progress. This can result in hints and tones of voice that will definitely be perceived as criticisms.
Diverse Causes of Academic Difficulties
A child may have academic difficulties for a number of reasons. How scaffolded in- struction should occur and how much of it is necessary depends in part on the rea- son for underachievement. For some children, the problem is in their home environ- ment. Their homes may be understimulating, that is, places where rich academically related experiences are rare. These children can arrive at school far behind class-
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167mates in the basic understandings critical to achievement in literacy and numeracy.
These children will require intensive experiences such as one-to-one tutoring that includes much scaffolding for student progress to occur (Slavin, Karweit, & Wasik, 1994; Wasik & Slavin, 1993). Understimulation in the home environment may con- tinue throughout the schooling years (Purcell-Gates, 1995). Thus years and years of scaffolding are needed for these children.
A variety of biological/neurological deficiencies also can cause learning problems.
Some children experience difficulties with academics because their general cognitive abilities are low relative to those of other children. Among these children, some are more responsive to instruction than others—perhaps because they have wider zones of proximal development (Budoff, 1987). In contrast to children with general cogni- tive handicaps, other children have specific learning disabilities, where they are neu- rologically different from the norm in a way that undermines typical academic achievement with respect to some specific competency (e.g., reading, writing, mathe- matics; Zeffiro & Eden, 2000). For example, some children who experience difficul- ties in learning to read appear to have structurally and functionally different left hemispheres, which translates into difficulties mapping sound sequences to letter sequences (Galaburda, 1983; Harter, 1991; Hynd & Semrund-Clikeman, 1989;
Joseph, Noble, & Eden, 2001; Rack, Snowling, & Olson, 1992; Shaywitz et al., 2003).
Other children who have difficulties learning to read seem to suffer from visual- processing difficulties (Livingstone, Rosen, Drislane, & Galaburda, 1991), especially difficulties in processing visual information as rapidly as it must be processed for f luent reading to occur (Wolf & Bowers, 1999). The variety of biological differences potentially underlying academic disorders complicates educational intervention.
Finally, as helpful as scaffolding may be with some children, it may not work with all children. In some cases, the zone of proximal development may be so narrow (e.g., in the case of severely retarded children) that great tutor support and prompt- ing are required even for little progress. Vygotsky’s (1978) presumption that all stu- dents respond to stimulation in their zone of proximal development represented his socialist convictions about the power of environment in developing cognition rather than a conclusion based on research. A scientific challenge for the future is to deter- mine when scaffolding can work, which teachers can do it, and which students can benefit from it.