You caught a beauty!!!

Download PDF of scaffold here.

theory behind scaffold…

‘Intelligence is not necessarily hereditary. Education can transform a child’ asserts Karl Witte*, a pioneer in what is now known as blended learning. We have the tools, he says, to help our students to change the course of their academic and then professional lives, no matter the level of their abilities before they enter our classes. First we have to believe this concept (high expectations), and then we need to be proactive in presenting the appropriate tools to our students. We fill our lessons with activities and techniques that will give them opportunities to build a solid foundation of knowledge upon which they construct their thinking. We identify and elucidate academic language before beginning a lesson, unit or project, and create exercises geared toward developing verbal, oral, and aural skills.

Academic language is so important that experts assert that the warehouse of words a person has stored away is directly connected to their quality of thinking: higher quality of words equals higher quality of thinking.** In this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the quality of thinking our students reach in our classes, will be the difference between being qualified for jobs that technology is (still) not capable of performing, and watching the world from the sidelines.

While evidence shows that passive vocabulary programs work in the short-term – to pass exams or to understand a text in the moment – these programs are ineffective in the long-term and in raising overall comprehension. Our students need to interact with first-, second- and third-tier words,*** through activities that gently push the from basic to more sophisticated vocabulary and phrases.

This scaffold is one way of achieving this goal. You will be helping your students to feel more confident, to express themselves with more clarity, and to have more possibilities of achieving success in and out of school. Students learn concepts and definitions through interaction with images and text and high-level memorisation strategies. The example given here is from a lesson on the human digestive system, and you´ll see how you can adapt it to any topic you`re about to introduce.

*Witte, Karl (1914). The Education of Karl Witte: Or, The Training of the Child. New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company.

**Zwiers, Jeff & Crawford, Marie (2011). Academic Conversations: Classroom Talk that Fosters Critical Thinking and Content Understandings, USA, Stenhouse Publishers.

***Beck, Isabel L. (2008). Creating Robust Vocabulary, New York, Guildford Publishing.

**** Recommended dictionary for sentence examples: Collins COBUILD dictionary

Articles on Student-Centred Learning

2. Divide the images up into blocks (see example below and find template here.)  

3. Copy a set of these blocks for each pair of students.
4. The pairs interact with the images in the following way:
   • Student 1 places six (6) images face up on the desk.
   • Student 2 has 10 seconds to study the images and then closes her/his eyes or turns away.
   • Student 1 removes one of the images, mixes up the other five, and tells Student 2 to open her/his eyes (or turns back).
   • Student 2 identifies the images that are present in full sentences, and then mentions the one that is missing, including as many details as possible of that image.
   • Students 1 and 2 switch roles and repeat dynamic.
   • The activity continues until you are satisfied that the students have assimilated the information thoroughly.
     • Possible dialogue between pairs:
     • Student 1: Turn around. Okay, turn back around. There were six image. Now there are five. Which one is missing?
     • Student 2: The five I see are the following: the colon, which includes the ascending colon, the cecum, the appendix and the descending colon, the colon wall, which includes the muscularis mucosae, the simple columnar epithelium, the oral cavity, which includes the soft palate, the lingual frenum, the superior labial frenum…(etc.) What is missing is the blood supply to the colon and rectum, which includes Arc of Riolan, the left colic, the superior rectal, and the Ileocolic.
     • Etc.
5. Formative Assessment: Show images and students take turns identifying them linguistically and saying them in sentences.
6. Reflection: In pairs, students write questions using the Question Continuum, exchange them with another pair, and work together to answer them.

video explanation of scaffold…

find more scaffolds here…