1. Scaffolding and Renovations: Building and Improving Writing Assignments Center for Teaching Excellence Workshop by Dr. Matt Miller, Associate Professor of English, Writing Assessment Director, USCA February 8, 2016

2. Scaffolding: view from above Scaffolding is the process of breaking down an assignment into manageable parts for students.

3. Scaffolding: Theory  Often traced back to L. S. Vygotsky’s Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (1978), scaffolding involves an arrangement of skills that progress from familiar skills to more advanced ones.  Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee in “Reading and Writing Instruction: Toward a Theory of Teaching and Learning” (1986) explain the belief in instructional scaffolding as “an alternative to traditional literacy instruction, or transmission-and-evaluation-based teaching and learning” (qtd.in Benko 292).

4. Scaffolding: Theory (cont.)  Cynthia Coe summarizes it as: “a way of organizing individual writing assignments throughout the course so that the first assignments require relatively simple skills like summarizing a passage, and each further assignment adds a more advance skill, like analyzing an argument, or comparing two positions, until the student has practiced all the skills necessary to write a full-blown philosophical argument” (34).  Other researchers note, “Scaffolded assignments deliberately emphasize the development of writing skills in addition to the end product. [...] The assignments break more complex writing tasks down into manageable pieces so that students can practice the skills specific to each task. Each task builds upon those that came before, so that students develop increasingly advanced competencies” (Padgett Walsh, Prokos, and Bird 482).

5. Scaffolding: Benefits We recognize that students have different learning needs, styles, and abilities.

6. Scaffolding: Benefits (cont.) It allows you to have more input in the writing processes of each student. Or, it can allow you to develop a writing process for assignments in the first place. Scaffolding can enable students to develop the following: ▪ Ownership ▪ Structure ▪ Collaboration ▪ Appropriateness ▪ Internalization (Jay 88) “Scaffolding means supporting students’ learning over time. Like ‘real’ scaffolding, it eventually disappears,” according to one teacher (Rhodes qtd. in Jay 88).

7. Scaffolding: Practice You can renovate your writing assignments by reorganizing the sequence of your assignments, repositioning your role as a teacher, and reorienting students to the writing processes.

8. Scaffolding: Practice (cont.) Multimodal Research Project: This project usually consists of three finished products that students do for a research paper. 1.Annotated Bibliography 2.Visual Argument 3.Argumentative Research Essay Revision can be used to facilitate more opportunities for scaffolding.

9. Works Cited Benko, Susanna L. “Scaffolding: An Ongoing Process to Support Adolescent Writing Development.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 56.4 (December 2012/January 2013): 291-300. Print. Coe, Cynthia D. “Scaffolding Writing as a Tool for Critical Thinking: Teaching Beginning Students How to Write Arguments.” Teaching Philosophy 34.1 (March 2011): 33-50. Print. Jay, Joelle K. “Meta, Meta, Meta: Modeling in a Methods Course for Teaching English.” Teacher Education Quarterly 29.1 (Winter 2002): 83-102. Print. Padgett Walsh, Kate, Anastasia Prokos and Sharon R. Bird. “Building a Better Term Paper: Integrating Scaffolding Writing and Peer Review.” Teaching Philosophy 37.4 (December 2014): 481-497. Print.

10. Resources Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. 2 nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. Print. Langer, Judith A. and Arthur N. Applebee. How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1987. Print. Simon, Lisa. “‘I Wouldn’t Choose It, but I Don’t Regret Reading It’: Scaffolding Students’ Engagement with Complex Texts.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 52.2 (October 2008): 134-43. Print. Smith, Mike and Mary Deane. “Supporting the Neophyte Writer: The Importance of Scaffolding the Process.” Journal of Academic Writing 4.1 (Spring 2014): 40-51. Print.