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Highly scaffolded teaching

Leader story

Marie Wright
Noarlunga Downs PS
Noarlunga Cluster

A highly scaffolded teaching approach that includes planned, defined and purposeful learning goals and questioning increases mathematical knowledge, skills and confidence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander learners.

Why we say this?
1. A highly scaffolded teaching approach increases mathematical knowledge, skills and confidence for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students particularly:

if students have missed a lesson(s)
if students have experienced trauma and related memory challenges. These are overcome by the revisiting of learning, predictable routines and explicit teaching
as each lesson builds on prior learning.

The teachers involved in this project have a background in Accelerated Literacy pedagogy. This means that they have a knowledge of Vygotskian theory of child development, and how learning precedes development. They have been exposed to the notion of the zone of proximal development, and the role of the teacher in contingently scaffolding students beyond what they can do independently to improve their learning...