1. Lesley Nelson-Addy lesley.nelson-addy@education.ox.ac.uk
What are the teacher and student perspectives of the purpose, use and effectiveness of scaffolds in English classrooms?
Lesley Nelson-Addy

2. Hands up if you have used or are still using any of these…
SPEED?
PEA?
PEE?
TACKLED?
MEAL?

3. Rationale
Scaffolds are commonly used in Primary and Secondary schools

4. What does the literature reveal?
‘Writing is considered one of the most cognitively challenging activities with which children are faced’ (Silby & Watts, 2015).
We should teach essay writing as though it were like any other form (Pirie, 1997).
Students, when faced with long analytical writing tasks, are likely to resort to a narrative exploration of texts (Flower, 1979).

5. SHORT TERM AND LONG TERM IMPACTS

6. Emotional response to texts? Collaborative writing?
Researcher Vs. Practitioner
FORMULAIC RESPONSE
Re-drafting?
Emotional response to texts?
Collaborative writing?

7. What did I do?
Student Questionnaires
Teacher Interviews

8. & What did I find out?
Training was instrumental in influencing teachers to use scaffolds in class.
If teachers abandoned the cloze activity, they still used some kind of writing support tool.
Only one teacher completely abandoned scaffolds and used re-drafting, which was encouraged through written or verbal feedback.

9. Only 12% of the lower ability students copied scaffolds word for word.
Lower ability students were more dependent on the scaffolds and more likely to begin to copy them word for word if they were granted consistent exposure to these scaffolds.
Higher ability students prefer assessment criteria because it enables them to check their own work and edit it accordingly.

10. Teachers who were more committed to making scaffolds available were more interested in what students produced as opposed to the process of writing they undertook.
More ‘freedom’ was given to higher ability students and over 50% of the students explicitly revealed their appreciation for this ‘freedom’ – 83% of the higher ability students welcomed scaffold removal.

11. To contrast, 75% of the lower ability students who had experienced scaffold removal experienced great distress about this – ‘angry’, ‘lost’ and ‘confused’.
Lower ability students use them but fail to remember them, while higher ability use them infrequently, recall and constantly reshape them.

12. MOVING FORWARD… How has this informed my own practice?
How has this impacted my school?
What can we do as a community?

13. References
Enstone, L. (2015). Stop PEEing Louisa Enstone. [online] Available at: [Accessed 5 Jan. 2016].
Flower, L. (1979). Writer-Based Prose: A Cognitive Basis for Problems in Writing. College English, 41, 19–37.
Lewis, M. & Wray, D. (1997). Writing frames. Reading: University of Reading, Reading and Language Information Centre.
Pirie, B. (1997). Reshaping high school English. Urbana, IL: National Council of English Teachers.
Silby, A., & Watts, M., (2015) Making the tacit explicit: children’s strategies for classroom writing British Educational Research Journal (41) 5, 801–819.

14. Thank you so much for listening!