Differences between scaffolding and differentiation

Hello everybody! 👋

As teachers, we should know and implement different methodologies and strategies to catch our student’s attention. That’s why today we are going to deal with two of them: scaffolding and differentiation.

Both strategies have in common that, in order to implement them, the teacher has to know the individual and collective zone of proximal development (ZPD) of his/her learners. According to Vygotsky, this is “the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem-solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers”.

Scaffolding 👥 has to do with the modifications the teacher makes when designing the lesson that allow all students to succeed in acquiring the same content, whilst differentiation 👤 refers to the idea of modifying instruction in order to cater each student’s individual needs and learning styles. Here we have some scaffolding strategies:

 Let’s see an example of a class devoted to improve the reading skill.

👥With scaffolding, the teacher might preview the text and discuss key vocabulary, or chunk the text and then read and discuss it. 

👤 With differentiation, the teacher might give a child an entirely different piece of text to read, or shorten the text or alter it, and/or modify the assignment that follows in order to meet the student’s special needs.

Therefore, whereas differentiation focuses on how students learn individually, scaffolding aims to  provide instructions to the whole class in order to reduce students anxiety when doing tasks. In fact, these two strategies overlap since both of them has as an objective to increase student success.

I hope this post has been useful to you all. See you in the next one! 😘