Scaffolding

The hardest part for me about being a teacher is watching children get frustrated with a task. Scaffolding is a way of preventing frustration by assisting children in tasks they do not understand and allowing that student to grow from your assistance in other tasks. MSU professors and TAs use some strategies that ensure students are learning efficiently. Rather than writing on a black and white chalkboard, many professors create colorful and attention grabbing PowerPoint for their lessons to keep students focused. In Gibbons it states that “teacher-guided reporting is adopted to make more explicit the role of teacher in providing scaffolding for the learner” (34). This sort of scaffolding occurs in most of my classrooms at MSU. Students are consistently asked to report what they learned or how they solved a specific problem. I do like when the teacher-guided reporting is volunteer –based and open to anyone. However, the worst part of this guiding is being called on when you are unprepared to answer something and many students get frustrated.
I feel that the classroom setup is one of the most important ways to control the interaction between students-students and teacher-students. We experienced the difference hands on in our TE 401 class. In our usual Holden Hall classroom we sit in rows facing the front looking at PowerPoint slides and listening to Becky teach without interacting as much. However, in Erickson hall we were much more involved in discussion when the seats were arranged in a circle. I have also seen a difference in participation based on classroom setup in my kindergarten field placement class from TE 301. When I first started my field placement the children were seated in separate group tables. Although the children participated, the participation level increased greatly when the desks were arranged in a U-shape facing the board. In this formation, all of the children were looped around and they could see other students, the board, and the teacher. Personally, I always enjoyed the creative ways that teachers would rearrange the room to see which way students learn and interact the most and I plan to do the same.