Transcript
1 turns · 26 minTeaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Beauches, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. Welcome back to another episode of the Equipping ELLs podcast. As always, I am so glad you're joining me here today. Now we're right in the middle of the how part of our framework. If you don't remember, we've been walking through this what we call the ELL success cycle. And this is a framework to set up where you will see success in your teaching, in your confidence, and in the growth of your English language learners. And the ELL success cycle starts always with who, knowing who our students are, moving into what do they need, what should we be teaching, then into the how, which is where we add in those scaffolds and supports, and then following up with our when, knowing when do we push them forward, when do they pull them back, all of those good things. So today we're in the how part of our framework. And today we wanna really talk about how do you actually deliver instruction that reaches your ELL students? And I want to start today with something that I think is one of the most misunderstood, but very widely talked about concepts in ELL instruction. And that is scaffolding. Every teacher has heard this word, right? Most teachers can name at least a few scaffolding strategies, things like word walls or graphic organizers or sentence frames or visuals. And most teachers genuinely believe they are scaffolding for their ELL students, even homeroom teachers, right? You know, you're putting some things in place. You're doing some scaffolding. But here's what I find when I actually sit down and observe how teachers are using these tools. Most of the time, what I've seen is that they're being used inconsistently and without a clear purpose and without any plan. And this is the key part to eventually remove them. And when that happens, what teachers think is scaffolding is actually something quite different. So today I want to talk about what scaffolding actually is, which strategies make the biggest difference for Yale students, and most importantly, how to use them in a way that actually builds toward independence instead of just getting students through the next activity. So let's commit to moving beyond just throwing scaffolds at our students. Let's commit to, after listening to this episode, really thinking about the scaffolds we use and having a plan in place that uses these for the time they're needed, but that we're always focusing on moving our students to independence. All right, let's dive in. Now, let me start with the definition, because I do think that the word scaffolding gets used so loosely in education, and it has been for many years now that it's kind of lost a lot of its meaning. Now,
Episode notes
In Episode 208 of the Equipping ELLs podcast, Beth Vaucher tackles one of the most widely discussed and most misunderstood concepts in ELL instruction: scaffolding. Every ELL teacher has heard the word, most can name a few strategies, and most genuinely believe they are scaffolding for their students. But when Beth observes teachers using these tools, she consistently finds the same problem — scaffolds are being used inconsistently, without clear purpose, and without any plan to eventually remove them. And when scaffolding never gets phased out, it stops being a scaffold entirely.
Beth begins with the definition most teacher training programs get wrong. Scaffolding comes from the construction metaphor — a temporary structure built alongside a building while it is going up. The key word is temporary. The whole point of a scaffold is that it eventually comes down. In teaching, scaffolding is any temporary support that allows a student to access content they cannot access independently yet. That word yet is everything. Scaffolding is always pointed toward independence — always building toward the moment when the support is no longer needed. This is what makes scaffolding fundamentally different from accommodation, which is a permanent adjustment. Both have their place, but treating them as interchangeable is one of the most common mistakes in ELL classrooms — one Beth admits she