Making a Difference

“Pre-assessment” strategies
such as pre-
testing can help you to identify students who 
need additional help with concepts, terms and 
background information.
“Questioning”
that is used as a scaffolding 
activity provides support and assesses progress, 
and is adjusted according to student needs as 
they emerse in discussions or interactions. 
Questioning approaches can include cues, 
hints, prompts and partial solutions. The level 
of speci
fi
city in questions can be increased to 
provide additional support to students working 
their way through a process or problem, or 
decreased as students gain competence and 
skills.
Provide opportunities for 
students to develop decision-
making and leadership skills. 
“Staging” activities
are investigations that 
prepare students by providing them with smaller 
or chunks of learning experiences early in the 
instructional sequence. These enable students to 
prepare to take on larger tasks or to understand 
complexities. Staging activities are sequenced 
in a process that moves from teacher modelling 
and proceeds with increasing transfer of the 
responsibility for learning to the student.

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Chapter 5–Differentiated Learning Experiences
78
Scaffolded Instruction
 
(continued)
Best Practices
What This Can Look Like
Make processes explicit and 
visible to students through 
activities such as:
visualization
• 
role-play
• 
simulations
• 
analogies and comparisons
• 
graphic organizers.
• 
“Structuring”
can provide students with 
tools and templates to help them structure and 
organize more open-ended tasks. “