This week, we are talking about High-Leverage Practice number 15, providing scaffolded supports. And, Ann, I'm so excited to have you for this one because you have quite the deep toolbox from which to pull for a variety of these supports. So, for you in your practice, what does this look like?

Well, scaffolded supports are such a broad umbrella. It encompasses everything from what I teach, how I teach, and what additional tools I need to get a student to see some success and progress in a particular concept or topic. How do I match my teaching style to the student's learning style? There is a whole host of various things that fall into the category of scaffolded supports. And at the end of the day, if I'm talking about a scaffolded support for a particular student, it's very individually driven.

Now, sometimes I'll have a group of students who face a similar challenge in that they're not understanding a particular concept that they're supposed to know by now. And I can say, “You know,  we have been speaking to these children for days, and they're just not getting it. And I noticed that these students love to doodle and draw. Here's my first clue that these students are probably not auditory learners.”

So, one of my scaffolds is that I can grab that group of students and try to present the material in a more visual way. I'm providing a scaffold in terms of how the material is presented, so that they can then process, digest, retain, and apply it. One of my scaffolds is: How do I present the material? Now, if that's a fail, where they're still not making progress, then it's, “okay, that's apparently not the area where I need to give them the extra support.”

At the end of the day, a scaffold in learning is not tremendously different than a scaffold in construction. When I go around a building that's being retrofitted and there is scaffolding around it, that's to hold what exists in place while changes, adjustments, and enhancements are being made. When I'm in education, a scaffold is very similar. I'm constructing supports around an existing structure, an existing learner, to try to provide the support that's needed while enhancements, extensions, and improvements are happening. So what exactly does that scaffold look like? Depends on what the particular enhancement and growth I'm hoping to see happen.

Now, because challenges come in so many different formats and flavors, there is no such thing as one scaffold fits all. So what I wind up having to do then is assess a combination of what the skill deficiency is. And there's a whole host of measurement tools I can use to determine that particular metric. And then why does that gap exist? Sometimes I've discovered the child has a challenge in terms of following the lesson because nobody ever took them to the eye doctor, and we didn't realize that they can't see the board. And I move them forward to the front of the room, and magic happens. All of a sudden, they are learning more productively. They're remembering more things.

Or I have a child who's easily distracted. So sitting them in the middle of the room is ineffective because there are too many distractions. Set them up in one of the forward corners of the room where I'm reducing the distractions. I provided a degree of scaffolding, but what I'm really doing is finding some environmental learning teaching instruction procedure that tries to address a particular gap.

So when I'm looking for scaffolding, the first task is, what's the need? And then what's the scaffold that I can build and provide that support while change is happening? And there are as many different scaffolds to provide as there are students who need them. And part of that magic of teaching is, all right, I've got 5,000 to pick. Which one do I pick? Or I only know three. I've tried them all, and nothing is working. So then I have some challenges that say, All right, I'm out of ideas. What’s next?

A lot of my teaching manuals will give me some ideas, some of them more effective than others. I admit that when I work with the primary children and they say, “Oh, just squirt shaving cream all over the desk.” I'm going, Oh, no, I am not doing that one. I appreciate its efficacy. I appreciate its appeal to my tactile learners, but I am not cleaning shaving cream up from all over the room. Now, I may put a tray of sand in front of them. I can accomplish some of those same things, different tool, same tactile, same kind of thing. But again, as the instructor, as the teacher, I do have my limits in terms of what scaffolds people will swear by. I go, yeah, no, that's just not happening in my room.

And then when I get to the point where I'm going, okay, I got nothing. I'd start looking for my sources of information. This is okay, I've got a veteran teacher down the hallway. What can they share? I can say, here's my student, here's their deficiencies, here's what I think, and here's what I've tried. And they can say, I had a student just like that 10 years ago, and this is what I tried that worked. I got a new idea.

I can also go down the room and say, I've got a brand new teacher fresh out of teacher prep. I admit they are probably more wired to online resources than I am. I can fully admit that at this point in my career, a gap in my skill set. So I'm going to go check out that younger teacher who says, “Do you have any online resources that you come across that would try to fill this gap?” So I've got a whole host of humanity that can provide me with some ideas, if I can give some clues as to what I think the gap is and why I think it exists. How do I determine what the gap is and why it exists? I have a conversation with students, or I use my assessment tools to try to identify where the gaps are. What are the gaps?

Well, this is why I love working with you is because you just have this wealth of information. You just blew through, like five of my questions. This is phenomenal. But I think this speaks to your tenure. It speaks to  your intense desire to collaborate and learn from each other and to take those learnings and apply them to different student situations. I love the visual that you provided of what scaffolding is. You know, it is the same as in construction because you're keeping what's there and you're trying to build more around without losing what's already there.

I would say I'm not sure if it's frustration or a complaint, or just that this one is too hard for me type of responses that I'll get from a lot of our practitioners is, “How the heck am I supposed to juggle all these different strategies for all these different students and all these different activities? Like, I understand the point of scaffolding and I get it for a learner of one, but how do I systemize that in a way that does not make me insane, as I'm trying to make sure that all these kids get all these things all the time when I'm just trying to, like, help them learn?”

The most effective way I found to do that is with some small group work. Almost every part of my curricular day has got some block of time that's called a small group. Now I may have a cluster of children that have some profound needs, some medium-scale needs, and some that have no deficiencies, and some are accelerating. So I can construct small groups so that I may provide intense support for my most challenged quartile.

And then I can construct small groups so that within groups, depending on my target, if I've got small groups where I'm trying to accelerate kids, then I will typically group by skill level. Or I might provide a more heterogeneous selection where my more skilled children can act as the helpers for the less skilled children. And then that gets some extra learning for my skilled kids. Because the more different ways you explain what you already know, the more solid your learning is. And then you've also got that social component of I'm helping my peers, so that I've been able to construct heterogeneous groups so that my moderate challenges can be distributed, and they can get support from their peers. Because everybody explains stuff differently. I've got kids who didn't understand the way I said it, and one of their peers explained something, and it was like light bulbs went off.

I to this day remember one of my guys, we were trying to explain even and odd, and I had a cluster of kids not getting it, and this child explained it, and I went, “Oh my goodness, that is such a different way of looking at it.” And I watched three light bulbs go off over kids' heads. I just went, “Oh my gosh, they now get it, not because of what I explained, but because of what one of their peers explained.” So scaffolding is not necessarily provided by the teacher one-on-one with the student. I can do one-on-six with a cluster of students, and I can put peer helpers in charge to help other students. Now I fully have to recognize that not all students are responsive to their peers. But then that goes into some of the construction of how you build that scaffold and how you provide the support, so that between homogeneous and heterogeneous groupings, I implement the scaffold I want to use to support the group.

And scaffolds are not just for my challenged learners. Scaffolds are also for some of my high flyers who say, All right, you have mastered my target for today. And if you sit there bored out of your mind, you are likely not going to sit there and just be quiet and stare at the daisies. So I need to provide some scaffolding to allow you to fly as well. So scaffolds apply to kids at all levels. And one-on-one, one-on-six, whole group, and even the whole group asking the kids for feedback on “what do you think? So you seem to understand this. Explain to me how you did it.” And then my peers, my kids, the student peers, are the scaffolds that are helping them sort out what may be gaps in either learning, or I just didn't say it, present it, or do it in the way they understood.

The way you're describing this, it really just sounds like some of the scaffolds are embedded into just like classroom routines or classroom rhythms or I mean, even if you've got like some certain students that sort of have like roles or jobs as part of being miniature co-teachers and peer supports, peer mentors, like those kinds of things just it's in how your classroom runs, which I really appreciate that perspective because I think so many times scaffolds are like, here's all the list of strategies, here's all the different things that we can do. And so much of it is, like you were saying, sort of teacher-directed.

And it is a good reminder to remember that it does not always have to be provided by the teacher, even if it is sort of teacher-directed, like I'm noticing. And let's try this. We can go that angle with all kinds of other different implementers leveraging those scaffolds. But there's a whole bunch of different, not just ideas of how to scaffold, but then how to implement those scaffolds in such a way that can actually perpetuate that student learning.

And the number of technological supports at this point is beyond anything that I am going to quantify with just how many possibilities there are. And for some of my learners who are very technology-driven, I'm quite happy to allow them to use technology as a scaffold to learn a particular concept. But that means we're following the directions. And this is something that sometimes my challenging behavior students, it's a reward for them to be able to use tech.

And if I use tech as a reward, one of the things I can do is provide some structured guidance on, “here is your 10 minutes of tech time to focus on the skill that I want you to focus on in this particular program. You stay focused on that scaffold for that period of time. Then you've got five minutes at the end to pick from these half dozen things that you like to do just for recreation and fun.”

So now, some of my behavior-challenged kids, I've given them a scaffold in a form that they appreciate and engage with. I've bought 10 minutes of focused instructional time. They have bought five minutes of relaxation and brain decompression time. And that allows them what I wanted them to get a little better chance to stick.

Yeah, this is such a cool conversation because so much of what you're talking about is just embedding it into how having a really robust instructional practice as just part of how you run your classroom and then figuring out what scaffolds to use or not use is just kind of moving students in and out of groupings or different types of activities or things that are already sort of naturally available within how you have designed all of the instructional opportunities of your classroom.

And it's just being responsive to seeing where those students are showing up, what types of supports or strategies may be effective for them. And you're just really strategically plugging them in within all of the great work that's already going on in your classroom.

And at the end of the day, different students need different scaffolds at different levels across content areas. So if I am in a multi-content classroom, typically those at the elementary level, I'm going to have really dynamic groups, and I have to have spent the time scaffolding the class to accept that there is going to be that degree of fluctuation during the day, during instruction. And depending on how you present it, sometimes kids get excited with that being their part of the day.

That says basically you trust us enough with our learning to go do our small group task. In every small group, we'll have a task to complete. And depending on what it is I want them to do, it always is supporting whatever our standard of the day is. But then my kids can reinforce each other. And if I've got them flowing well that day, then I am rotating from group to group to group to group, providing individual scaffolds within individual groups, hitting particular individuals, small groups, to again advance them from wherever they are.

But it's being exhausted at the end of every day because there is only so much brain power I have to provide in the day. And if it's constantly firing on “where they are at, what's going on? Oh, those two need to be separated. Yeah, we can do that.” Or “oh, those two would work really well together. Shift. Yeah, I know you're sitting with that group. Please go over here with this group now,” and just always sort of in motion. You get really wound up getting really good results from your kids because they know that you are attentive, focused, and you care, and that you can respond on those quick turns to give them the support that they need to advance their learning. And once they get to recognize what they need, they can then vocalize those needs. So I don't need to guess what scaffold's needed. They're going to tell me.

This is like the most beautiful description of what MTSS in a classroom environment looks like. You're literally describing how to set up a tier one scenario so that you can just provide continual access to tier two as needed, with consideration of that tier three just being embedded in everything that's available within your room, which is such a high-level instructor move. Which is honestly why so many people love talking with you and working with you to try to make sense of all of these moving pieces within their classroom.

Because, like you said, it is just fluid. Different students need different things at different times. And if you have it all available, you can simply plug them into what they need when they need it, and it's just part of it. So it's not all these individual plans that I now have to keep track of each individual plan and try to meet all of those needs every single time in all these specific ways. No, this is just all the things that are available, and how we do what we do is I'm just going to connect you to what you need along the way. It's such a beautiful picture of the design of MTSS. And it's so nice to hear you describe like, yeah, this is just education, this is just how this works.

But one of the things I need to be willing to concede is I'm not going to meet every kid every day where they need to be. I'm going to give it my best shot because, as a human, that's all I can do. I can get to the end of the day and go, “Oh geez, oh Pete, I missed that particular marker. I missed that particular kid. Yep. They asked me for help, and I got distracted over in that other group, and I never got back to them.”

Mental note, tomorrow when we start our group activity, I need to cycle back first thing to that child and say, I remember that you told me yesterday you needed XYZ. Let's sort that out now. That way, the kid doesn't start to believe they're forgotten. But as a practitioner with a big group, I am not going to get to everybody every day, the way it would be really nice. But practically, it is not going to happen.

Thank you for bringing your tenure. Thank you for bringing all of the strategies and how you make sense of those strategies within the rhythms and structure of your classroom. This is invaluable expertise and wisdom that so many of our practitioners are constantly trying to figure out. So thank you so much for painting that picture with me today.

Thank you for having me.