Internal Scaffolding

Internal scaffolding is student-generated where students learn how to have inner conversations with the text, using five essential reading strategies. 

Teachers will work in groups to discuss the following questions:

• What does scaffolding the text mean?
• Why is it important to scaffold the text?
• How do you scaffold the text?

Inner Conversations: “Nothing is more important during reading than the reader’s thinking.”

• Good readers have inner conversations with the text. We will practice these inner conversations with the five key reading comprehension strategies: Visualizing, Predicting, Questioning, Connecting and Inferring. 
• “I do,”   “We do,”   “You do” approach will be introduced as a guided lesson format. 
• Interactive Read Alouds will be used to practice each strategy.

Sample Lesson: Visualizing

Good readers see pictures in their head while reading rather than just reading words.

The trainer will ask the teachers to turn on their “inner camera” and see a picture of a tree. The teachers will be pushed to see color, size, surroundings, type… with practice, words will come alive for deeper and memorable reading. When ready, we will visualize a sentence, paragraph and more. Teachers/students will sketch their visuals so we can “catch” their thinking. 

The Salamander Room is an excellent read aloud to practice visualizing. Sensory images will be added to this lesson where teachers create a five sensory chart catching how words evoke the five senses: taste, feel, hear,.....

Teachers will design a lesson on inner conversations for their specific grade; the trainer will check for understanding and ideally watch implementation in the classroom.

External Scaffolding

External scaffolding is teacher-generated where the teacher frames or scaffolds the text to support student learning.

We scaffold or support students before, during and after reading. 

Before reading

The “tea party” format will be introduced to make predictions, build knowledge, and incite curiosity before reading a short story. Lines/sentences from the story will be distributed to teachers. They will walk around  the room as if they are at a party- meeting and greeting classmates and sharing their sentences. Teachers return to their tables and make predictions about the story. Then the whole class shares as the trainer charts the predictions.  Teachers are ready to dive into the story to see if their predictions are accurate. 

Anticipation guides, vocabulary building, wordstorming, KWL charts are some of the other before-reading activities that will be introduced.

During Reading

Teachers/students will read with a purpose.Some activities to guide the reader:  Coding the text, jigsaw reading, Cornell notes, finding gists, reciprocal reading, essential questions…

After reading

We will practice a fishbowl discussion/socratic seminar related to the text.  Graphic organizers, mind maps, gallery walks, and summarizing are some examples of after-reading activities.

“Teaching content knowledge is teaching reading.” The Knowledge Gap, by Natalie Wexler.

Students cannot internalize a text if they lack background knowledge. We will look at the baseball study to illustrate this point. To build background knowledge students need exposure to a content-rich curriculum. This means do not delete social studies/history and science from the elementary curriculum. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds need a knowledge-building environment.

“Reading to learn” in social studies and science

Reading informational text

• We will practice note-taking, annotating, highlighting, text coding
• Essential questions to guide the reader
• Double-entry journals
• Four Corners to encourage debates
• Frontloading
• Text structures and features ( pictures, graphs, charts, boldfaced words..)
• Conversational Cues and protocols for student voice
• Text evidence to ground claims

Vocabulary building to support reading comprehension

The following techniques will be introduced for rich vocabulary lessons:

• The Frayer Model: word study
• Interactive Word Walls: exposes students to challenging words and supports writing
• Word sorts: classifying words for critical thinking
• Marzano’s (vocabulary guru) 6 steps to teaching vocabulary 
• Academic and domain-specific vocabulary

Why Literature Circles?

• Student led mini-book clubs
• Students are social beings and love to work with their peers.
• Students have some choice in the books they read. 
• Promotes equitable learning where everyone has a voice
• Once the students are trained, thoughtful discussions emerge from these mini book clubs
• Discussions are led by students; the teacher monitors and facilitates as needed. 
• Students read with a purpose
• They are motivated to complete their reading so as not to disappoint the group
• Collaboration is at the heart of this approach

The steps:

1. Teachers practice literature circles with their peers using select articles
2. Groups are formed based on the article chosen
3. The roles are introduced and practised with short passages.
4. Roles are flexible based on grade level:  While reading the teacher focuses on their given role and takes notes to share with the group. For example, the passage finder looks for meaningful, descriptive, and interesting passages to share.
5. Once the reading is completed, the groups meet and discuss the article, short story or book.  The upper grades can choose from novels for more advanced discussions.

1. Let’s start with a sentence: We will build from simple to complex sentences by combining and expanding sentences. We will craft sentences with powerful verbs, descriptive adjectives, and specific nouns.
2. Students will practice the writing process: planning, drafting, revising and editing in their writer’s notebook. 
3. Gist statements, summaries, essays and note-taking are introduced in all subjects- students “write to learn.”
4. Six Traits of Writing: Organization, Development, Voice, Sentence Fluency, Word Choice and Conventions. The six traits were designed to guide teachers in teaching best practices in writing. Writing rubrics are aligned to assess student work.
5. The Painted Paragraph/Essay
   Students will color code their essays with a highlighter to support visual learners
   Example:
   • topic sentence pink
   • supporting details green
   • conclusion yellow

Explicit and systematic instruction of phonics based on the science of reading including the following:

• Phonemic awareness
• Phonics
• Fluency 
• Word recognition