The Misunderstood Art of Scaffolding

Often mistaken for either excessive hand-holding or unstructured discovery, scaffolding is a precise and dynamic process that adapts to learners performance in real time.

Scaffolding as a term in education was first used by Wood, Bruner, and Ross in 1976 and pretty quickly became a cornerstone concept in educational psychology. In their seminal paper "The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving," they described scaffolding as a process "that enables a child or novice to solve a problem, carry out a task, or achieve a goal which would be beyond his unassisted efforts." This metaphor, borrowed from construction, elegantly captured the temporary support structures that expert tutors provide to novices.

The study involved mothers tutoring their young children (ages 3-5) in building a pyramid from wooden blocks. The researchers observed that effective tutors didn't simply tell children what to do or demonstrate the entire task. Instead, they provided calibrated support, maintaining the child's interest, reducing complexity, highlighting critical features, managing frustration, and demonstrating possible solutions when needed. The researchers noticed that successful scaffolding involved a gradual transfer of responsibility. Initially, the tutor controlled most aspects of the task, but as the child's competence grew, control shifted incrementally to the child. This handover wasn't abrupt but occurred through a series of subtle adjustments in the level and type of support provided.

What made the notion of scaffolding particularly resonant was its natural connection to an already established idea; Vygotsky's ‘Zone of Proximal Development’, broadly defined as the space between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with assistance. As Vygotsky's work was being translated and disseminated in Western educational circles during the 1970s and 1980s, scaffolding offered a practical framework for implementing his theoretical insights. The two concepts complemented each other perfectly; Vygotsky's ZPD explained the psychological space where development occurs, while scaffolding described the mechanism through which adults facilitate that development. My teacher training was centred around Vygotsky but as a sort of philosophical wellspring for constructivism and I’d wager there are few teachers who didn’t have the same experience.

In many ways, scaffolding reconciles opposing educational philosophies. It honours the constructivist belief that learners must build their own understanding while acknowledging the instructivist recognition that expert guidance accelerates and deepens learning. But yet there is a tension at the heart of the progressive interpretation of scaffolding; fully guided learning but with minimally guided instruction.

To my mind, Scaffolding as originally conceived by Wood, Bruner, and Ross, involves structured, responsive support rather than simply creating conditions for exploration and hoping students will construct knowledge independently. When scaffolding is reduced to an assumption that students will naturally figure things out with minimal intervention, it loses its defining feature: contingent guidance that is intentionally faded as competence develops. When scaffolding is misinterpreted as merely creating conditions for discovery with minimal guidance, it loses its essential character as described by Wood, Bruner, and Ross. Authentic scaffolding involves strategic intervention with the teacher actively marking critical features, demonstrating solutions, and reducing degrees of freedom at crucial moments.

Perhaps this tension stems from a reluctance to acknowledge the necessary asymmetry in the teaching relationship; the recognition that the expert possesses knowledge that the novice does not yet have, and that direct transmission of some elements of this knowledge is not only efficient but necessary for development within the zone of proximal development.

When Paul Kirschner and I wrote about Scaffolding and the Wood, Bruner, and Ross article in ‘How Learning Happens’ we subtitled the chapter ‘not as easy as it looks’. The reason for this was because scaffolding demands a remarkably complex set of skills and for me, the most complex skill is the cognitively dissonant ability to hold two mental models at once: their own model of the overall problem to be solved and, crucially, the child's model of the problem. As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said; “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

This principle in action is what David Wood and colleagues termed "contingent control"; a dynamic process where educators continuously adjust their level of support based on the learner's moment-to-moment performance. The teacher must not only recognise when a student is struggling or succeeding but must also understand why. This requires precisely tracking the evolution of the student's mental model in real time, identifying exactly where and how it differs from expert understanding. Only then can support be adjusted appropriately. It's this continuous dual processing; simultaneously maintaining expert knowledge of the subject while monitoring and mapping the student's developing understanding, that makes true scaffolding so challenging to implement. The teacher must constantly ask: "What does the student understand now? What's the gap between their current model and the target knowledge? What's the minimum support needed at this exact moment to help them bridge that gap?"

Differentiation: A Deeply Flawed Idea

Where I think scaffolding has veered into lethal mutation territory is in its very rapid calcification into differentiation, (the idea that students should receive permanently tailored support rather than temporary, strategic assistance) and here I think Keith Stanovich's seminal work on the "Matthew Effect" in literacy provides a powerful framework for understanding how differentiated approaches can inadvertently widen achievement gaps. The term derives from the biblical passage in the Gospel of Matthew where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Stanovich's research initially focused on reading development, where he observed a troubling pattern: children who begin school with stronger reading skills and larger vocabularies tend to accelerate their growth, while those who start behind often fall further behind over time. This occurs through several mechanisms:

• Reduced content coverage: By compromising the curriculum to meet low expectations, we trade aspiration for acquiescence. Research by Gamoran found that lower-track students may cover 50% less curriculum content in a given year compared to higher-track peers.

• Simplified text exposure: When reading materials are consistently simplified for struggling readers, these students encounter fewer complex language structures and academic vocabulary. Nagy and Anderson's research suggests that the gap in word exposure between high and low readers can amount to millions of words per year.

• Cumulative cognitive demands: Each year, the gap in what students have been taught widens. By middle school, students who received consistently simplified curriculum may lack the prerequisite knowledge needed for grade-level work, creating what Engelmann called a "knowledge deficit cascade."

The Paradox of Well-Intentioned Harm

The tragedy of this situation is that differentiation typically begins with good intentions, teachers want to meet students where they are and help them succeed. Yet by adjusting expectations downward rather than scaffolding support upward, these approaches often cement initial disparities into permanent educational trajectories.