Definition
Temporary support structures that educators build around tasks, gradually removing them as students gain competence. It's training wheels for learning, except good scaffolding eventually disappears without students noticing.
Example Usage
The writing professor used instructional scaffolding by first providing sentence starters, then paragraph templates, and finally removing all supports once students could construct arguments independently.
Origin
Coined by Jerome Bruner in the 1960s, building on Vygotsky's zone of proximal development
Fun Fact
The term comes from construction scaffolding, though unlike buildings, students sometimes panic when you start removing the academic scaffolding and demand you put it back.
Related Terms
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