You caught a beauty!!!

Download PDF of scaffold here.

The brain sparks and grows when we make mistakes – even if we are not aware of it – because it is a time of struggle; the brain is challenged, and so this is when it grows the most.* Errors need to be celebrated in our classroom; we need to help our students to embrace the effort they make in their studies and focus on mistakes and successes alike, and not only the outcomes.

This scaffold puts a twist on this dynamic and, instead of an activity that permits students to make mistakes, this one is designed with mistakes already embedded in the material. As in best practices, students then use past knowledge to identify these errors. Through critical thinking, they work together not only to read and understand the concepts in the new information, they look for content and grammatical errors and then make the necessary corrections.

To cater to even more learning styles, this scaffold asks students to physically move throughout the classroom, and interact with the material and their classmates at the same time. The example we use here is from a unit on natural sciences, but you’ll see how you can adapt it to your subject with ease by using the templates provided.

I’ve used this scaffold countless times, with initially reluctant and disbelieving teachers who felt that the students would be overwhelmed with the difficulty of the task. They were the same ones, however, who were the first to rave to their colleagues about the effectiveness of the activity, and how it engaged their students in very interactive ways, preparing them for the body of the lesson.

*Boaler, Jo (2016), Mathematical Mindsets, Jossey-Bass (pp. 11-12).

Step by step: 

1. From a unit you’re about to begin, choose 8-12 images that summarise the subject, and place them into the template. (See above.)
2. Below each image, copy 3-4 sentences from the page, explaining the image.
3. For each sentence, make one intentional error of either: grammar, vocabulary or content
4. Number each textbox.
5. For a face-to-face class, print out these textbooks and mount them individually on the walls of the classroom. (For a virtual class, put them in folder in whatever platform you use, so that students can access them and look at them one-by-one.)
6. Students are given a table with three column: Textbook Number, Mistake, Correction
7. Students work in pairs or groups of three (3) to find the errors. (You need to make sure they understand that there is one error for each sentence.)
8. They write the error in the second column of the table and the correction in the third column of the table.
9. They can use their Student Books to find the errors if they need to. (In this way, they are becoming more autonomous and also learning to use the Student Book as a valuable resource.)
10. In the face-to-face classroom, students move from one text block to another, reading the texts, marking down the mistakes in the appropriate column in the table, negotiating the correction between them, and writing what they agree on in the third column.
11. Formative Assessment:  In a face-to-face classroom or digital (where you can put the students in breakout rooms), groups combine, share their work, and negotiate and discrepancies. When you feel that most have them have reached agreements on the table, project the answers on the white board.
12. Reflection: How did the activity help you to understand the information? What part of the activity did you like the most and why? Was it helpful to be able to use the Student Book as a resource? What if you had to work individually. How would that have changed your experience in completing this activity