1/ The Ceiling

The simplest way to understand school improvement research is to know this: Maximize the amount of time students are engaged in on-grade level (or above), relevant, and meaningful tasks and you maximize student learning. Or, another way, the more time you ensure students are working on challenging work, the more learning progress you will see.

The two charts below bring this to life. The system is filled with well-meaning educators who want to “meet them where they are” and teach in the zone of proximal development all day long. The simple fact is that humans learn more when they are engaged in more difficult work.

What does this mean for you as a school leader? Start with a strong curriculum, clear expectations for its use, and strong systems for monitoring its implementation. If you are just beginning the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) journey, you’ll need a robust plan for curriculum selection that involves many stakeholders and a robust professional learning plan that sets teachers up for success in using the new curriculum.

2/ Scaffold > Differentiation

First, we define.

I’d like to acknowledge that the words get used interchangeably quite often so readers may quibble with my definitions. For our sake, agreeing with the specific definition of each word is not as important for understanding the point here as it is to know that both of these things happen and, I believe, these are the most widely understood applications of the concepts in education.

Differentiation seeks to “meet learners where they are” by changing (nearly always simplifying) some portion of the learning task. Sometimes this is prompted by an IEP, ILP, or 504, and other times it’s done in the moment by teachers responding to their expectations and events within the classroom. Put simply, the learning task is simplified to “meet the needs” of the student.

Scaffolding, however, starts by keeping the expectations of the learning task the same and asks the question, “What does this student need to be able to accomplish this learning task?” The learning task is kept rigorous, but supports are provided.

Let’s look at an example. In this example, fifth-grade students are asked to read a news article about the Civil War and answer a few open-ended questions.

In differentiation land, the teacher might choose to use a simpler version of the text, ask fewer questions, or ask simpler questions. In each case, the fundamental task of the assignment is made easier to accommodate (did you see that word there?) the learner.

Alternatively, in scaffoldville, no part of the learning task is altered. Instead, supports are provided to help the student be successful. Examples might include:

• the child is allowed to listen to the on-grade-level text

• have a peer (or teacher) read it to them first before they read it themselves (go ahead and Google “dyad reading”)

• the questions are given sentence stems

• key vocabulary terms from the text are defined ahead of time