It breaks up learning new topics into stages in which old ideas are connected to new ones and students are led from guided to independent instruction. Scaffolding, on the other hand, breaks up even differentiated lessons so that they are delivered in increasingly complex chunks.

For some students, highly visual materials may be appropriate, while other students might be more highly tactile learners. This might mean providing different materials to students with different learning styles. In practice, differentiated instruction is characterized by attempts to change the activities that students use to learn about a topic. Scaffolding, on the other hand, was defined as breaking up learning into chunks so that students tackled increasingly more complex material.

In a report issued by the Tennessee Department of Education, differentiation was defined as a framework in which different students received different methods of learning. Occasionally, teachers confuse scaffolding and differentiation. By implementing scaffolding, teachers can improve the likeliness that students will grasp new materials and retain what they’ve learned. It’s a process that many teachers have used for decades but that has recently received much more attention as an instructional approach. Scaffolding refers to breaking up new concepts so that they can be learned more easily. Scaffolding in Education by Becton LovelessĪ key concept in education for the last decade has been the idea of scaffolding.

The scaffold meaning