You caught a beauty!!!

Download PDF of scaffold here.

Download PDF of scaffold here.

theory behind scaffold…

We all know by now (pretend that you do, even if you don’t!!!) that teaching critical thinking is a never-ending job. Critical thinking strategies are domain sensitive, which simply means that a strategy that works in art may not work in history, and a strategy that works debating an issue may not work in figuring out how to outmaneuver an opponent in lacrosse.

Critical thinking strategies are also intricately tied to culture. The following is a fascinating study of students that elucidates this connection:

• A group of Chinese students along with a group of North American students were given an exam with problems to resolve based on a version of Hansel and Gretel most familiar to North American children.
• Seventy-five percent of the American students were successful in reaching a solution to the problems, while only 20% of the Chinese students presented appropriate conclusions.
• The two groups were then given an exam with problems based on a version of the same folk tale most often presented in China. In this case, the percentage of students from each culture who reached successful solutions was diametrically reversed.
• The conclusion reached in the study, was that the polarity in scores resulted from the students’ ability to more rapidly process the details of the versions of the story they were most familiar with – the objects referred to, the reactions to circumstances in the plot, the dialogue of the characters, the subtleties of responses, etc.*

The studies expound on the subject, concluding that critical thinking strategies can become embedded in our consciousness the more we are exposed to them. In other words, the more opportunities we give our students to use them, the more successful they become in viewing situations from many angles and on many levels.  

So what can we do?  Well, instead following our first instinct and throwing up our hands, thinking that the task is so vast that we might as well not even begin, we instead take every opportunity to expand our practice. Whenever possible, broaden the variety of strategies we use in our classroom activities so that when our students go out into the world, they are more prepared – all because of the extra effort we put into our lessons.

 We add to this repetition. As was illustrated in the scenario above with the Chinese and North American students, repetition of knowledge is essential in the likelihood of assimilating strategies more deeply.  Successful problem-solving many times results from simply repeated exposure to varied strategies.

In this scaffold, students have the opportunity to develop their linguistic and visual skills as they negotiate connections between text and images. They also interact with the information through temporal and grammatical transformations, as well as bodily-kinesthetic interplay.

* (Willingham, 2007)

step by step…

4. Students work together in the following way:

• Match the sentences with the image (remind them that there is no one correct answer, but only answers that can be justified).
• Read the sentence clusters aloud.
• Conjugate the sentences to the grammatical structure you’ve chosen (past, future, conditional, passive/active, interrogatory, etc.)

5. Formative Assessment/Reflection: Students write the answers to the following questions from the Question Continuum. (Remember, some questions reflect content and others reflect methodology, thus augmenting self-efficacy.)

• Are humans animals?
• Which animals wear clothes?
• Who studies the Pre-History of humans?
• When did Pre-History begin?
• Where did humans wander as nomads?
• Where did humans wander as nomads?
• How did you decide with your classmates which images match the text?
• Why do we study Pre-History?
• What if you were thrown back in time. Would you like to live during Pre-History?

video explanation of scaffold…

find more scaffolds here…