Scaffolding is a word we use a lot in education, but we don’t understand the connection between scaffolding and culturally responsive instruction. When we move beyond seeing culturally responsive instruction as simply a motivation technique, a self-esteem booster, or a social justice curriculum, we begin to see the connection between the two.

Scaffolding is a process to help students stretch themselves and level-up their learning. It requires us to be responsive to their effort to change how they process new content or how they move beyond surface-level regurgitation of facts for testing or grades. This is our role as a cognitive mediator – what we say or do when the student is doing this new cognitive work during productive struggle makes all the difference. In the last lesson, I introduced three of these “meta-moves” to use during impromptu instructional conversations.

Unfortunately, when it comes to dependent and compliant learning, we mostly think of scaffolding as something to help dependent learners and English learners “access” the content or move through a lesson.  

We have forgotten that scaffolding in its original context is something to help a learner stretch himself and move into that learning sweet spot, the ZPD (zone of proximal development). It’s in this cognitive sweet spot that the brain stretches itself, grows more gray matter, by making new cognitive connections to existing background knowledge. 

It is this process of making new cognitive connections that, over time, strengthens a student’s capacity to take in more content during instruction and make sense of it through information processing (i.e., “chewing” in the Ready for Rigor terminology). This is where the process of being responsive lives. 

Scaffolding is the process of responding to the student’s growing sense of agency and action as he consciously tries to improve his understanding or skill. 

Scaffolding that responds to the student with the appropriate amount of care and push comes in the form of a set of collectivist instructional learning design principles, to set the conditions for sticky learning and effective chewing. It also comes in the type of cultural learning tools you use to set up instructional interactions for productive struggle, that create a sort of collaborative scaffold that allows the back-and-forth nature of scaffolding for cognitive stretch among students. These cultural learning tools come in the form of structures and processes rather than strategies.

Mastering responsive scaffolding for stretch is the key to growing your capacity as a culturally responsive educator.  

Remember — this isn’t a technical task but an adaptive skill set for you to master. Scaffolding puts the “responsive” in culturally responsive.