Scaffolding Complex Texts

Last week Bridget wrote about “under-scaffolding” and “over-scaffolding” a reading assignment for students. So, what are some things you can do to PERFECTLY scaffold a reading assignment?

Scaffolding takes time—for teachers and kids—and thus should be used primarily when you have a challenging text whose comprehension is essential to the content or skill development within your classroom. 

One strategy that teachers use frequently is to ask students to highlight the main ideas, but many of our students end up with a bright yellow handout, not knowing what is important to highlight.

This 1:40 video from Teaching Channel demonstrates how important it is to:         

•       Give students a reading purpose before they read. This may be in the form of a question, or may be asking them to read to find evidence for a statement, belief, argument, hypothesis, etc.
•           Ask students to highlight ONLY the specific words and phrases that address their reading purpose.
•      .    After the reading, include student talk, small- or large-group work to ensure that students have identified the key details to support their reading purpose, and then have them use that information in some way to validate the work they just did—sharing the information, using it for the next task, writing a paragraph, completing a graphic organizer, etc.

What else might you do?  Brooke and Bridget suggest:

• ·         Use a Close Reading Strategy.  SpringBoard, the grades 6-11 ELA curriculum, has just revamped its approach for 2017-2018, and it includes previewing the text, setting the purpose, having students do a first reading, and then providing a sequence of text-dependent questions for a second reading. This will deepen comprehension.·        
•        Have students read/highlight for only one question at a time.  This will really help to focus your less competent readers.·         
•        With multiple questions (probably no more than 3-4), you could give various colored highlighters, with students finding the best textual support/evidence for question #1 in yellow, question #2 in pink, etc.  The down side to this is that some of the text might be used to answer for multiple questions, and kids would be frustrated trying to use different highlighters on the same words/phrases.·         
•       Jigsaw the reading. Purposely give your struggling readers a question with easier-to-locate textual evidence, and your strongest readers a question demanding more inference.  Have each student share his/her best evidence while others in the group highlight or take notes in the text.   
•       After students read and highlight, ask them to number their pieces of evidence from 1-3, in best to worst, or most-likely-to-use to less-likely-to-use. This will help them to evaluate the evidence.·         
•        Encourage annotation EVERY time students read—writing questions, using symbols, drawing pictures, writing reactions in the text. This will keep them engaged and will help them to retain more information.