Scaffolding in Inquiry

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I was able to catch a few minutes of the Toddle webinar, "Designing authentic inquiry with Tonya Gilchrist" today and I came away with a nugget I want to share with the teachers at my school. 

Teachers often overestimate how much prior knowledge or skills the students bring to a lesson. One teaching technique I am trying to emphasize is for teachers to go slowly, break down tasks, and give scaffolds to students.

In the webinar, Tanya shared how this might look in an inquiry-based writing program. 

The flow of her lesson (for a school she was not working at) was:

  1. Find out what is being taught. This class was learning about self-management skills.
  2. Connect the learning to a big idea. Here the class was already learning about self-managing.
  3. Give them a sentence stem and have them complete it.
  4. Give more scaffolds.




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