There are a lot of buzz words in education, each having their own moment. Depending on what year you entered the profession, you likely were trained heavily in one of them because "that's the direction education is heading." When I was in school, tests were soon going to be a thing of the past, and everyone would have a PORTFOLIO of their work! This never took hold as it was an obvious logistical nightmare for any school that tried it. It attempted to make a come back in the digital age, but no college was interested in a student sending them a million work samples rather than a transcript, so it fizzled. Perhaps, your buzz word was learning style, differentiation, growth mindset, or project based. I'm not saying any of these is of zero value, but they didn't turn out to be the end-all-be-all of education either.
One that initially appealed to me when I first encountered it was GRAPHIC ORGANIZERS. When I first learned about scaffolding, I my naive little mind thought, "Yep, this is how we're gonna do it. Students will be able to provide themselves with the support they need by rearranging their notes."
If you are unfamiliar with the concept of graphic organizers, it doesn't mean you haven't seen one. A Venn Diagram is an example; so is a flow chart. It's any way in which information is arranged into groups visually. In fact, the initial appeal for me was the idea of having notes that were arranged thematically rather than in a linear fashion.
And, these may have worked in some teachers' classrooms, but they didn't work in mine. Why? Because I didn't know how to teach them the best way to use them. I provided blank copies of all kinds of organizers and told them to have out it. Graphic organize to your hearts content. Did I tell them what that meant? No, because I didn't really know what it meant. I mean, I can make a Venn Diagram of things where there are clear overlaps and clear distinctions (e.g. the comparison between Christian school and church, comparing and contrasting the causes of the French and American revolutions), but that particular tool doesn't work for students who are learning the hierarchical structure of the court system (a flow chart would work better for that one) or the meter of poetry (AB structure has served us well).
Do students know when a Venn diagram will work and when they should use a different organizer? They won't unless we teach it to them explicitly. Most of us didn't. We just provided these and hoped they would help. We told ourselves we were scaffolding, but we weren't. The equivalent in a real world scaffold would be walking up to a building with boards and ladders and hoping the person who needed the scaffold would figure out how to build one.
Scaffolding is important. In fact, it may be one of the best things we do as teachers of novice learners. Providing a chart, a formula sheet, or even a graphic organizer might get students past the hurdle of an overloaded working memory. In the same way, play rehearsals start while actors still have the script in their hands, learning complex skills often starts with supports from these sorts of tools.
But the tools aren't scaffolds if we don't tell them how to use them. If I had a student a periodic table, he is holding a useful tool, containing, as my friend Jenny once said, "all the world's knowledge of a sheet of paper." But I can't expect him to use it if I don't explain what atomic numbers are and why atomic masses are shown with decimals. If he doesn't understand families vs. periods, he will not be able to use the table to determine valence electrons or number of energy levels. A blank Venn Diagram means little if I haven't told students when and how to use it. A sheet of polyatomic ions is only helpful to students who know what polyatomic ions are and how to recognize equations that have them.
A TOOL IS ONLY AS USEFUL AS OUR UNDERSTANDING OF ITS USE!
Teachers, before you adopt the latest thing, ask yourself if you can properly explain it to students. Until you can, it doesn't matter how good a thing it is. Don't use it until you are ready.
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