To become independent and effective readers, writers, thinkers, and participants in discourse, we need to model the research-based mindsets that allow learners to understand their needs and enable themselves independently, and, when appropriate, use available scaffolds and technology-enabled resources.
Much like we wouldn’t remove a light switch during daylight, we don’t remove scaffolds that were unnecessary during one reading but became useful in a later reading, perhaps even a reading that was rated at a lower level of complexity.
To exemplify this phenomenon, consider the sentence “The notes were sour because the seams were torn.” To those unfamiliar with the workings of a bagpipe, this is a straightforward sentence. Though it is made up of all single-syllable words, it is, however, incomprehensible to many who are not familiar with bagpipes.
The famous Recht and Leslie baseball study revealed empirical results to this effect that were already well known among education researchers. Cognitive science explains why students who had a wealth of background knowledge, interest, and lived experiences with baseball increased their achievement in reading comprehension at a rate outpacing measurably higher-skilled readers with low background knowledge.
Their ability to leverage skills attained in previously mastered reading strategy instruction could not overcome the lack of prior knowledge assets the reader brought to the text. You can find the Recht and Leslie study here.
Given the variability of readers in today’s classrooms and the lack of certainty many teachers may have about students’ prior experience and knowledge, particularly among highly mobile populations, the predictability of our scaffolds mitigates against several common problems we have observed in working with hundreds of districts and thousands of schools, teachers, and leaders over the past 30 years.
Predictable scaffolds reduce the cognitive load for teachers and students in leveraging necessary support for accessing grade-level text, giving both students and teachers greater confidence in attaining grade-level success. (See the TNTP Opportunity Myth for more on why this is so important even in settings with mandated grade-level curriculum resources. You can find the entire report here and the summary here. )
The routines allow students to grow increasingly independent. See the Continuum of Blended Learning and Young Adult Success for Scaffolding Guidance, giving teachers time and opportunity to personalize learning through 1:1 highly contextualized supports such as further explanation, feedback, and clarification that may not work well for students in a whole class setting.
Finally, given the increasingly complex nature of the text collections and tasks in each of our units and across the grade level experience, we provide reliable frames for thinking, including protocols and sentence stems that allow students to build on knowledge and skill to attain ever-more complex engagement with texts. (See examples of increasing challenge within the relationship between texts, tasks, and reliable scaffolds.)
While students who are multilingual English learners may appear to have the same needs, they are often very different, though one common need exists across the board for all learners of a language: vocabulary. For this reason, ThinkCERCA provides vocabulary support in every lesson along with robust, leveled English Learner Supports for beginning, intermediate, and advanced ML/ELs. Since day one of English language learning and instruction for both teachers and students can happen on any day of the year.