1/16/2023 0 Comments Scaffold meaning in teaching![]() However, I quickly realized that my advanced students weren’t letting the scaffolds stop or restrict their writing at all! I worried, though, that such formulaic writing would stunt and bore my writers who needed to be challenged. It also helped them grasp the concept of blending others’ style and techniques with one’s own writing. This really helped my students who had never written a poem prior to the class. When I used Kwame Alexander’s writing as a mentor text (a scaffold in and of itself), I told students exactly what to talk about in each stanza of their own writing. Click to check out the lesson I use in my classroom. ![]() ![]() I love using Kwame Alexander as a mentor text because his sports-themed poetry hook students who aren’t super into creative writing. Scaffolding helps students get started and guides them through the process of making it to the end. Too much freedom can cause students to freeze up, write forever with no stopping point, or spend too much time brainstorming ideas and not actually writing. If students know they have to get from point A to point B, generally they can at least get started. Scaffolding Writing Gives Students a Starting Point It’s crazy, but a blank page and no rules really makes some students anxious! Especially when they’ve been trained their whole lives to regurgitate “correct” answers in order to make teachers happy. Often, my students struggle in a class that has “no right answers,” so providing scaffolding helps ease their anxiety about writing a “wrong” poem or story. Providing some guidelines, requirements, or outlines reassures them that what they’re writing is “right.” Scaffolding Writing Builds ConfidenceĮven my best writers are often unsure of themselves. If the purpose of creative writing is to let students experience more freedom in writing, why even bother with scaffolding? 1. ![]() How, then, do you guide students and provide support without limiting their creativity? Do you even really need it at all? Why Should We Use Scaffolding in Creative Writing? In a creative writing class, however, where rules are meant to be broken, providing that scaffolding can be a challenge. One of my favorite scaffolds is a graphic organizer.Īnything you do that helps students get ideas on paper can be a writing scaffold. It can be the outline for an essay or the sentence starters for a classroom discussion. ![]() In the classroom, scaffolding can take shape in many ways. Scaffolding is the supports that we, as their teachers, put up to support student writing. Likewise, when students are constructing their new projects, they, too, need scaffolding without it, they have to create with very little support. When new construction projects begin, usually supports are erected to help construction workers move materials, to give them a foundation to work on, and to otherwise aid in general construction. The term scaffolding comes from construction work. But what does it mean to scaffold writing? And what does scaffolding look like in a creative writing class? What is “Scaffolding”? When students, who are uncomfortable with putting their ideas on paper, find themselves in a creative writing class, scaffolds are even more important. Scaffolding writing–whether with worksheets or through techniques–is especially important for struggling writers. When it comes to creative writing, I feel scaffolding is especially important. ![]()
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