Today I witnessed something happen in my classroom. All of the dull days of just rote reading, struggling to get through the key ideas, answering questions that nobody wanted to talk about gave way to a phenomenon of understanding and engagement. My students' assignment was to conduce a "reader's" theater and then discuss the key facets of the story "Harrison Bergeron" in groups. What I saw was a class filled with energy and enthusiasm for learning. The reading was done with passion and the discussions were very engaging, and my mentor teacher just sat back and watched as the whole scene unfolded.
How did this happen? For weeks it seems that my mentor teacher has been planning and preparing for this very outcome. I just didn't see it until I finally stepped away. The technique of "scaffolding" is the practice of making sure all the basic techniques and content knowledge has been taught so that students may engage in higher order thinking and learning. For students to have engaged in the discussions that I was hearing today, it was necessary to understand the unfamiliar vocabulary, read the story thoroughly, and come prepared with some ideas or notions about the themes prior to the discussion. All this was achieved through weeks of scaffolding, the boring and tedious stuff that I felt was dragging on and unnecessary. However, if this did not occur, then the scene today would have looked more like the teacher leading a bunch of clueless students into a discussion with him/herself. They would have done no work or thinking for themselves because they were not properly prepared for it. I wonder if any of the students see the method to a teacher's madness. After all, if you are the one scaling the scaffolding, how could you possibly see all the rungs and ladders that have brought you to where you currently are.
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